| Popis: |
This chapter traces the textual history of four stories—“Beyond the Bayou,” “The Return of Alcibiade,” “A Wizard from Gettysburg,” and “Ma’ame Pélagie”—from their initial publications in periodicals to their inclusion in Kate Chopin’s first short story collection, Bayou Folk (1894). These stories portray the aftermath of the Civil War in Louisiana between the 1860s and 1890s. When read together, they demonstrate a progressively deteriorating landscape, strategically revising northern magazine editors’ positioning of the South as sentimental and exotic to magnify the social concerns that continued to envelope a nation recovering from war. It demonstrates how Chopin challenges geographic boundaries through her narrative representations of them to develop a reader’s spatial consciousness about relationships between dominant power structures and regional exceptionalism. |
