Heather Ostman

Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace explores selected texts by four major American authors: Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sojourner Truth, and Kate Chopin. This monograph presents a nuanced analysis of the relationship between these authors and religion. While they critique organized religion and challenge the premise of doctrine and the restrictiveness of religious practice, they also depict mercy, redemption, and renewal beyond church walls—offering a lens for considering the American sociopolitical identity. In this study, Ostman relies on the parables of Jesus as a compelling tool to frame these authors’ religious visions, which drew their sense of hope from loss and brokenness. She highlights the remarkable timeline in which the four writers depicted these visions of hope, shared during the years leading up to and through the Civil War (1861–1865). At a time when many other authors made comparisons to the Apocalypse, Whitman, Hawthorne, Truth, and Chopin evinced visions of hope through new religious interpretations. This volume is a valuable resource for postgraduate students and scholars of American literature, religious studies, and Christian thought.

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.

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.

American Women Activists and Autobiography examines the feminist rhetorics that emerge in six very different activists’ autobiographies, as they simultaneously tell the stories of unconventional women’s lives and manifest the authors’ arguments for social and political change, as well as provide blueprints for creating tectonic shifts in American society.Exploring self-narratives by six diverse women at the forefront of radical social change since 1900—Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Mary Crow Dog, and Betty Friedan—the author offers a breadth of perspectives to current dialogues on motherhood, essentialism, race, class, and feminism, and highlights the shifts in situated feminist rhetorics through the course of the last one hundred years.This book is a timely instructional resource for all scholars and graduate students in rhetorical studies, composition, American literature, women's studies, feminist rhetorics, and social justice.

American Women Activists and Autobiography examines the feminist rhetorics that emerge in six very different activists’ autobiographies, as they simultaneously tell the stories of unconventional women’s lives and manifest the authors’ arguments for social and political change, as well as provide blueprints for creating tectonic shifts in American society.Exploring self-narratives by six diverse women at the forefront of radical social change since 1900—Jane Addams, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Mary Crow Dog, and Betty Friedan—the author offers a breadth of perspectives to current dialogues on motherhood, essentialism, race, class, and feminism, and highlights the shifts in situated feminist rhetorics through the course of the last one hundred years.This book is a timely instructional resource for all scholars and graduate students in rhetorical studies, composition, American literature, women's studies, feminist rhetorics, and social justice.

This book explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in KateChopin’s fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of hernovels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism looks at theways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that servedon multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as atrope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women’sstruggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinatedauthenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to thedistinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled thearticulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church. This book revealsChopin to be not only a literary visionary but a writer who saw divinity in thenatural world.

The Second Chance Home for Girls in Texas imposes a 12-step doctrine and Christian exhortation on a dozen teens with histories of substance abuse and other failures to conform. The proprietor, Miss Sallyanne, presides over a regimen of chores, self-affirmation chants-"God loves me, and so do I "-and group therapy sessions in which she pressures girls to reveal their sinful experiences with drugs and (usually abusive) sex. Into the snake pit comes Lorilee, who is preternaturally self-possessed despite the needle tracks on her arms and her claim to have borne a son by her own brother. She breaks rules with impunity, knows secrets that she shouldn't, and impudently corrects the Reverend, Sallyanne's father, when his fire-and-brimstone sermon misstates the Bible. The narrative unwinds in the point-of-view voices of several residents of Second Chance. A chorus of girls condemns Lorilee as a stuck-up bitch; the seen-it-all cook, Starlene, thinks the teen is the devil; Summer, a quiet girl who writes everything in her diary, is both unnerved and inspired by Lorilee's promise of forgiveness and freedom from her past, a vow that leads to violence.

This book explores the Catholic aesthetic and mystical dimensions in KateChopin’s fiction within the context of an evolving American Catholicism in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close reading of hernovels and numerous short stories, Kate Chopin and Catholicism looks at theways Chopin represented Catholicism in her work as a literary device that servedon multiple levels: as an aesthetic within local color depictions of Louisiana, as atrope for illuminating the tensions surrounding nineteenth-century women’sstruggles for autonomy, as a critique of the Catholic dogma that subordinatedauthenticity and physical and emotional pleasure, and as it pointed to thedistinction between religious doctrine and mystical experience, and enabled thearticulation of spirituality beyond the context of the Church. This book revealsChopin to be not only a literary visionary but a writer who saw divinity in thenatural world.

The influence of Latin American writers—as well as other immigrant writers and their first-generation peers—has reframed the literary lens to include multiple views and codify the shift away from the tradition of white male writers who formed the core of the American literary canon for generations. Junot Díaz is one of the most prominent and influential writers in contemporary American literature. A first-generation Dominican American, the New Jersey native is at the forefront of a literary renaissance, portraying the significant demographic shifts taking place in the United States. In The Fiction of Junot Díaz: Reframing the Lens, Heather Ostman closely examines the linguistic, popular culture, and literary references woven throughout Díaz’s fiction, including the short story collections Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, as well as the Pulitzer prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Ostman also considers Díaz’s work as it relates to issues of identity, citizenship, culture, aesthetics, language, class, gender, and race. By exploring how Díaz reframes the immigrant narrative—highlighting his innovative linguistic and genre-based approach—Ostman provides crucial insights into how Díaz’s writings relate to key issues in today’s world. The Fiction of Junot Díaz will be of interest to scholars and students of the immigrant experience as well as fans of this gifted writer.