Kate Chopin's The Awakening has been seen as an early evocation of the ideas that would galvanize the women's liberation movement. Critic Harold Bloom sees the work as arising from the autoerotic energies inherent to the poems of Walt Whitman. ""Edna emulates Whitman,"" he writes, ""by falling in love with her own body."" This new volume containing a selection of critical essays from various schools of criticism will assist students reading and studying this great American work. Notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of Chopin's life, an index, a bibliography, and an introduction written by the inestimable Harold Bloom complete the volume.