Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

One The Obsessive Vision
Two The Phantasmagoria of American Personality
Three Forms of Obsession: Oates's Fictional Stance
Four With Shuddering Fall, A Garden of Earthly Delights
Five Expensive People, Them
Six Wonderland, Do With Me What You Will
Seven The Assassins: A Book of Hours, Childwold
Eight Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Dust-Jacket Blurb

This is the first full-length critical study of one of America's most prolific, intense, and versatile contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates. Newsweek has said she "belongs to that small goup of writers who keep alive the central ambitions and energies of literature." Waller presents an overview of Oates's novels, short stories, poetry, and criticism, then focuses on what he considers to be "her most important works, her novels." This is where one can best see the direction of her vision of American society.

Waller considers Oates to be a prophetic writer and compares her to D. H. Lawrence in that she is able to look into and beyond the human psyche. Oates makes her readers acutely aware of the tensions that manifest themselves in erupting passions and violence, and she perceives amidst this the barely recognizable desire of the ego, to transcend its obsessions. Her characters are described with such intense realism that their feelings toward their world become a psychic landscape.

In Dreaming America, Oates's characters and we ourselves participate in the creation of our reality. what america now has i s materialism nearing its furthest expression. And it is Joyce Carol Oates's service as a writer, argues Waller, that she shows us how the human spirit is being damaged by the world as we know it, while at the same time affording us intense involvement with that spirit.

Excerpt

In discussing Oates within a Lawrentian perspective—a suggestive preliminary, I believe, to an appreciation of the impact and importance of her work—we should not ignore their differences: the trivial ones of time and place, the more serious ones of stature. Lawrence is one of the greatest writers in English since Shakespeare; Oates is one of the most promising writers of our time. But it is a measure of her potential that we have to look to Lawrence as a measure and a guide, even if by invoking his name we cannot obscure Oates's relative limitations.