Contents

Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments

I. Primary Sources
The Works of Joyce Carol Oates

II. Secondary Sources
Criticism on Joyce Carol Oates and Her Work

III. Indexes

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Excerpt

What summary one can offer in the meantime, from the bibliographer's perspective, is simply this: that regardless of what long-term reputation Joyce Carol Oates may enjoy later, she is that rarest of contemporaries, the genuinely experimental writer. While the sanctioned imitation of Barth or Borges may deny itself any chance of genuine success, it may secure itself in a way against conspicuous failure, protected as it is by "schools" and sheltered by precedent. What Oates is doing has been codified by no school, by no critic, not even by herself. She is willing to ask and write about the hardest aesthetic and social questions of her time, and she will not countenance the easy answer, will not play to the expectations of an established tradition or of an established avant-garde, however much trouble that refusal may cost her fiction. Joyce Carol Oates is that rarest of novelists: the novelist who, because she takes actual risks, can actually fail. Would that one could say the same for more than a handful of artists of our time, a few careers now unfolding that stand a chance of making a real difference in our literature.

Revised Wed, Aug 10, 2005