Introduction -- 1 Post-Civil War Stories -- 2 Art, Music, and Language -- 3 Postbellum Transitions -- 4 The “Protomodern” City -- 5 New Orleans and Chopin’s Novels -- Conclusion.

This book examines selected short stories and novels by Kate Chopin through the lens of the city of New Orleans. Chopin’s depictions of and references to New Orleans celebrate the vibrancy of this unique American city, but also illustrate the complex, interdependent relationships defined within its coded system of racial, gendered, and class designations. These stories feature canny depictions of the complexity of human struggles for freedom as well as love within this nineteenth-century southern city. While Chopin has been highly regarded as a local color writer and especially as a feminist literary icon, this book shows how the author’s “city” stories also point to her sophistication as an author who perceived the shifting literary landscape, and it identifies the ways many of these stories’ protomodernist elements anticipate the advent of the Modern era.