Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Misreadings and Marriages: The "Place" of Joyce Carol Oates
2. Eden Valley Residence: With Shuddering Fall and A Garden of Earthly Delights
3. Fabulation and Documentation: Expensive People and them
4. Personality in Flight: Wonderland
5. Beyond the Looking Glass: Do with Me What You Will, The Assassins, and Childwold
6. Sacred and Profane Visions: Son of the Morning and Unholy Loves
7. Mythic Residence: Bellefleur, Cybele, and Angel of Light
8. Woman's Place: A Bloodsmoor Romance, Mysteries of Winterthurn, Solstice, and Marya: A Life
Conclusion: Missing Views, "Last Days"
Afterword

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Excerpt

Using the devices of realist, existentialist, moralist, and fabulist, working with ideas drawn from history, philosophy, psychology, poetry, and the general culture, Oates has taken fullest advantage of her privileged position. She mines the art of predecessors and contemporaries. In the bewildering profusion and violence of modern times, in the lives of her students, in her own fiction, she finds her subjects. Allusive, assimilative, her novels are profoundly experimental; they are also read. Oates perceives art as an ongoing and open discourse, "a kind of spiritual 'marriage,'" a resource for society's collective aspirations. She thus makes no apologies for either her readership or her university residence.