Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

'Beer offers an assemblage of discrete essays ( written in the spirit of the short story itself), connected by generic and thematic concerns, with the delightful result of giving us a series of lucidly written close readings from the perspective of what Virginia Woolf calls 'the common reader' - Katherine Joslin, Western Michigan University A wide range of short fiction by Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the focus for this study, examining both genre and theme. Chopin's short short stories, Wharton's novellas, Chopin's frankly erotic writing and the homilies in which Gilman warns of the dangers of the sexually transmitted disease are compared. There are also essays on ethnicity in the work of Chopin, Wharton's New England stories, Gilman's innovative use of genre and 'The Yellow Wallpaper' on film.