Preface
Chronology

Chapter One
"The 'I,' which doesn't exist, is everything"

Chapter Two
Holy and Unholy Loves: God, Art, Sex, Goodness

Chapter Three
Genres Reenvisioned

Chapter Four
Dualities of Female Identity

Chapter Five
Author and Other

Chapter Six
Appetites and Bitter Hearts

Chapter Seven
Critical Contexts and Contradictions

Notes and References
Selected Bibliography
Index

Dust-Jacket Blurb

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most provocative and prolific American writers of the post-World War II era. Her impressive body of work, which consists of twenty three novels, fifteen short story collections, ten volumes of poetry, four plays, and literally hundreds of reviews, scholarly articles, essays, and journalistic pieces, is notable for much more than its sheer bulk. The range, depth and variety of her work, and especially its individuality, have earned her an exalted place in American letters.

In this study, Joanne V. Creighton offers the first critical study focused on the middle period of Oates's career. A companion to Creighton's earlier Twayne study, Joyce Carol Oates (1979), this volume picks up where the previous one left off, considering the fifteen novels written between 1977 and 1990. Included in Creighton's analysis are Oates's pseudonymous mystery novels, published under the name Rosamond Smith. The author has benefited from Oates's own response to a first draft of this study, and has ably interpreted the complexities of Oates's work. Creighton's insightful analysis will appeal to all scholars and students of contemporary American literature.

Excerpt

Despite the imaginative richness of Oates's fictional world, . . . there is an underlying repetitiveness. Oates is obsessed with the same subjects and situations, recast into new fictions. Her central obsession is with the search for authentic individuality. She recognizes that the old stable ego is a fiction; rather, the personality is a fragile, protean, passionate, mysterious entity, precariously balanced between conscious and unconscious contents. Oates respects the other within the self, other people, and the natural world. She depicts the need to get beyond the conflicts and contradictions in our culture that would deny authentic selfhood, and she portrays the enormous difficulty of that task.