Inspiration and Transcendence in the Fiction of Kate Chopin: Echoes of Nineteenth-Century German Women and Women Writers

Inspiration and Transcendence in the Fiction of Kate Chopin: Echoes of Nineteenth Century German Women and Women Writers marks the first comprehensive study which explicitly links Kate Chopin’s work to nineteenth-century German women writers Fanny Lewald, Ida Hahn-Hahn, Malwida von Meysenburg and German women, Antoinette Fehringer and Eleonore Grunow, who served as role models for her fiction. This book (re)-establishes connections to Chopin’s contemporaries Nietzsche, Hegel, and Schopenhauer and introduces her indebtedness to the writers of the German Romantic period, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the politician Carl Schurz. The modernity of her fiction and the radical-progressive tenets established through her transatlantic influences place Kate Chopin’s work into the context of major historical, socio-political and philosophical movements of nineteenth-century Europe.

Heidi M. Podlasli-Labrenz has taught at Ball State University in Indiana and the University of Bremen in Germany.