The Awakening - Tapa blanda

"The Awakening is not only one of the most important novels in the history of American women's writing, it is an acknowledged American masterpiece. Edna Pontellier is an American Emma Bovary, deeply dissatisfied by the restricted possibilities available to a middle-class white woman in the 1890s. Rejecting her society's sexual norms and seeking a more fulfilling life, she is eventually destroyed by the limitations she cannot overcome, but along the way Chopin offers a compelling portrait of female experience, one of the first of its kind. Recognized as being as important a literary protest against the treatment of women as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' The Awakening is taught at universities and schools across the US, and is overdue for equal recognition outside of its native shores. It is great news that Canongate is bringing The Awakening to the British reading public at last" (SARAH CHURCHWELL)

"Incisive, brilliant and haunting" (MAGGIE O'FARRELL)

"Chopin's deceptively slight novel is the kind of book revolutions are made of . . . Reissued with a forward by Barbara Kingsolver, this angry, eye-opening novel is well worth adding to your reading list" (Harper's Bazaar)

"Even more powerful than I remembered" (MARGARET DRABBLE)

"A Creole Bovary is this little novel of Miss Chopin's" (WILLA CATHER)

"Chopin's slight, brittle and fierce novel became a classic and a cult, shocking readers with its candid and unsentimental portrait of marital infidelity . . . it remains delicately bitter and acidly angry" (Observer)

"Sometimes bold, fearless writing really does have to wait for 'someone in some future time' for readers yet to come. Sleeping Beauties, once awakened, will always serve a contemporary agenda. But Chopin's The Awakening is now justly regarded as an American classic and read with passion and delight" (Literary Review) --Kate Chopin

The Awakening, originally titled A Solitary Soul, is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating mixed reaction from contemporary readers and criticism.The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature; it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern masterpieces of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.