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We use the reception history of Kate Chopin's The Awakening to study the social context in which and processes through which literary texts are evaluated. We explain The Awakening's ascendancy from an initial negative critical position in 1899 to its current canonical status by the emergence of new "interpretive strategies" for understanding and evaluating texts. The dominant interpretive strategies of nineteenth-century reviewers sentimentalized women as sel ess wives and mothers responsible for moral purity, making it dif cult to construct a valued or fruitful narrative from The Awakening. Late-twentieth-century feminist interpretive strategies, however, were highly productive tools for rereading The Awakening, generating a socially resonant narrative focused on the search for an independent female self. Most important, we show that analytic attention to interpretive strategies allows sociologists to analyze both the meanings constructed from texts and the differential judgments attached to them under varying interpretive strategies. Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening was published on April 22, 1899. At that time, Chopin was a well-known resident of St. Louis, a widow who supported her six children through writing. Her career was increasingly successful; she had published her rst novel in 1890 and two successful collections of short stories, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie , in 1894 and 1897 respectively. Chopin had also published a large number of short stories, poems, and essays in both popular and literary magazines, including Youth's Companion and Vogue. Despite Chopin's growing reputation, The Awakening was not well received. It was denounced as "most unpleasant" (Boston Herald 1899), as "poison" (G.B. 1899), and as a book "that the author herself would probably like. .. to tear. .. to pieces by criticism if only some other person had written it" (St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat 1899). Chopin was described as a writer of "sex ction" (Chicago Times

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