Joyce Carol Oates
(1938 -)
(Also has written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith) American novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, and editor.
Joyce Carol Oates: Introduction
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Oates, Joyce Carol (1938—)
Undoubtedly one of the most prolific and versatile authors of the twentieth century, Joyce Carol Oates writes short stories, novels, plays, poetry, screenplays, and e...
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Joyce Carol Oates - (1938 -)
(Also wrote under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, playwright, author of children's books, nonfiction writer, ...
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One of the United States's most prolific and versatile contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) focuses upon the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern American society.Oates...
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"Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than fifty novels and short story collections to her name," wrote Ian Thomson in the Spectator. "Yet she writes wonderfully of life's un...
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Joyce Carol Oates was born in the small town of Lockport, New York, on 16 June 1938 and grew up in a rural setting nearby in Erie County. Together with her brother, Frederic, and sister, Lynn Ann, sh...
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Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She completed her B.A. at Syracuse University in 1960, and she was awarded an M.A. by the University of Wisconsin in 1961. On 23 January 1961 she marr...
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In 1990 Joyce Carol Oates won both the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction and the Rea Award for the Short Story, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize that honors living American...
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[This entry was updated by Sarah Catlin Barnhart (University of South Carolina) from the update by Nancy Barendse (Charleston Southern University) in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biogra...
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In the following essay, Zapf delineates the three main aspects of the aesthetic composition of Oates's “Master Race.”
Cecilia Heath, the protagonist and narrative voice of Joyce C...
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In the following essay, Cunningham examines the themes of self-enclosure and identity in Oates's first five volumes of short stories.
“Halfway through the decade, something went terribly...
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In the following essay, Trachtenberg provides a thematic analysis of the seven stories in The Hungry Ghosts.
“The difficulty with stories, even true ones,” one of Joyce Carol Oates...
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In the following essay, Saalmann elucidates the function of the Berlin Wall and the status of East-West relations in “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Our Wall.”
It was a time of...
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In the following essay, Chauche asserts that “Our Wall,” “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and “Lamb of Abyssalia” “go through the stages of the imperceptible pa...
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In the following essay, Sepcic considers three of Oates's short stories as imaginative reworkings of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, James Joyce's “The Dead,” and Fra...
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In the following essay, Dörfel discusses aspects of Oates's short stories set in or alluding to Germany.
Introduction
Germany and the Germans do not play an important role in Joyce Carol...
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In the following essay, Smiley argues that Oates's frequent depiction of exploited and abused female characters can be better understood as effects of specific cultural conditions, particularly...
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In the following essay, Dean examines several of Oates's stories written in the epistolary or journal form, asserting that these pieces provide insight into her interest in the relationship bet...
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In the following essay, Johnson contends that Oates's first collection of short fiction, By the North Gate, “not only investigates virtually all the important themes that characterize he...
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In the following essay, Dessommes finds parallels between the character of Connie from “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and Mrs. May, the protagonist from Flannery O'Co...
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In the following essay, Carrington explores the metaphor of translation as well as other aspects of the stories in The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese.
Remembering Adrienne Rich&#x...
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In the following essay, McPhillips surveys the central thematic concerns of Oates's early novellas.
The most successful of Oates's early novellas is the first. Triumph of the Spider Monk...
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In the following essay, Daly maintains that through an examination of the short story collections The Wheel of Love and Last Days we can see that Oates “has been a feminist writer whose fiction...
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In the following essay, Rozga offers a feminist interpretation of Oates's reworkings of Anton Chekhov's “The Lady with the Dog” and James Joyce's “The Dead.&#...
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In the following essay, Saalmann explores the symbolism of the Berlin Wall in Oates's “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Our Wall.”
Joyce Carol Oates's prose pieces,...
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In the following essay, Zviniatskovsky contrasts Oates's “The Lady with the Dog” with the original version by Anton Chekhov.
Love. Either this is the remnant of something which is...
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In the following essay, Hoeveler considers the relationship between “The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly” and Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw.”
1: ...
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In the following essay, Wesley examines Oates's transgressive heroine in the short story “Stalking” and the ways in which the figure defies restrictive gender ideology.
Although J...
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In the following essay, Slimp contends that what the character of Connie experiences physically in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” “leads her to an increasing awarenes...
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In the following essay, Kozikowski investigates Oates's use of the Cinderella motif in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Joyce Carol Oates's story remains promine...
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In the following essay, Loeb compares Oates's “The Spiral” to Gustave Flaubert's outline for an unpublished novel, La
“Pour vivre, je ne dis pas heureux …, ma...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
I have been an early fancier of Joyce Carol Oates's fiction, which struck me as that always admirable thing: writing possessed of feminine sensitivity that in no wa...
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Critical Essay by Sue Simpson Park
The title [of "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life over Again"], with its seventeen words, suggests a d...
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Critical Essay by Sanford Pinsker
Miss Oates' third novel—Expensive People (1968)—was a radical departure from the social milieu and gritty realities of her first books. By that I...
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Critical Essay by Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbanski
Fifteen-year-old Connie's acquiescence to Arnold Friend's threat-ridden seduction is an appropriate finale to Joyce Carol Oates's ...
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Critical Essay by Jeremy Treglown
The solemn domestic absorption of many of Joyce Carol Oates's stories seems narcissistic,… though this prolific and highly acclaimed author often writes...
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Critical Essay by Harold Beaver
[In Crossing the Border] Joyce Carol Oates has produced another fine set of tales—witty, wily and variegated. The theme yet again is one of "marriages and...
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Critical Essay by Victoria Glendinning
["Son of the Morning"] is a hugely ambitious novel. Clearly well-researched, it could serve as a basis for the sociological study of the theory and...
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Critical Essay by Robert Phillips
Ms. Oates's [Night Side] is … more than a grab-bag. All 18 tales are concerned with borderline reality, what the author has called "that mysterio...
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Critical Essay by Charlotte Goodman
The Gothic world which Joyce Carol Oates has projected in her novels and short stories is one that is shaped by irrationality, extreme emotions, and violence. Oates...
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Critical Essay by Greg Johnson
In our age of "born-again" Christianity, of neofascism under the banner of biblical truth,… it is not surprising that Joyce Carol Oates's nin...
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Critical Essay by Maureen Howard
[In Son of the Morning] Nathanael Vickery is an evangelist who believes that he is visited by Christ, even chosen by God to be one with His Son in a miraculous second ...
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Critical Essay by Paul Zweig
Joyce Carol Oates's imagination runs to violent extremes [in "Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money"]: a pack of snarling wild dogs; o...
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Critical Essay by A. G. Mojtabai
["Unholy Loves"] opens with a welcoming party, a scene of jealous, strained, fairly poisoned attentiveness, the characteristic swarming of small academic...
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Critical Essay by Edward Guereschi
Unholy Loves is a mockingly overheated title announcing the novel's satiric fascination with the passions of Academe. Passion—or perhaps choler—...
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Critical Essay by Joanne V. Creighton
[The Wheel of Love] has thematic unity: focusing exclusively on the emotional complexity of human relationships, the collection offers a rich—if distressin...
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Critical Essay by Linda W. Wagner
To view Oates' fiction in retrospect is to be surprised that what seemed to be basically "realistic" fiction has so many variations, and shows su...
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Critical Essay by G. F. Waller
The almost obligatory topic with which to introduce Oates is, in fact, the amount she has published. A survey of her work may suggest a compulsive writer and maybe even ...
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Critical Essay by David Bell
[Much] of Joyce Carol Oates's recent prose output has been an unpruned orchard of high gothic romance. The tales collected in A Sentimental Education are her newest...
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Critical Essay by Robert Kiely
That Joyce Carol Oates writes with an unmistakably American voice is a truth more or less universally acknowledged. Though the locations of the six stories in "A ...
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In the following review, Joseph comments on the plot, themes, and characters of With Shuddering Fall.
The enthusiasm that greeted Joyce Carol Oates last year upon the publication of her first volume, ...
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In the essay below, Wesley explains how Oates's fiction challenges gender ideology by describing the characterization of the protagonist of "Stalking."
Although Joyce Carol Oates ...
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In the following interview, compiled from various question-and-answer sessions during the fall of 1990 while Oates visited at Bellarmine College, Oates addresses influences, her writing habits, the re...
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In the following review, Robinson surveys the themes and storytelling techniques of The Rise of Life on Earth, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, and Heat and Other Stories, focusing on representations of &#...
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In the following essay, Wesley surveys Oates's later fiction to describe the function of "the transgressive other" in her narrative technique.
According to Tony Tanner [in Adulter...
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Below, Manske details conventions of Gothicism and realism in Oates's fiction, emphasizing the breadth and violence of her representation of American life.
"All art is autobiographical. ...
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In the review below, Bader elucidates the feminist themes of Foxfire, noting the questions raised by the text.
The place is Hammond, New York, far upstate, near Canada. For five girls—Legs Sado...
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In the following review, Carroll assesses What I Lived For, finding that "the structure of this straightforward mystery is transformed into art of another order entirely, an exemplary work of m...
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In the review below, Janeway draws thematic parallels between A Garden of Earthly Delights and Theodore Dreiser's fiction.
This isn't the best book that Joyce Carol Oates is going to wri...
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Below, Cassill calls Expensive People "a prophetic novel," alluding to several literary precedents.
The question is no longer whether Miss Oates is a very good writer—she is, inde...
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In the following essay, Stout discusses the motif of passivity in Do with Me What You Will as a key element of stereotypical femininity.
Despite her involvement with women characters and the unsparing...
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In the essay below, Chell examines Mysteries of Winterthurn for the diverse ways that Oates uses conventions of the ghost story to indicate feminist concerns.
Joyce Carol Oates has matured into writin...
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Below, Martin analyzes "The Sacred Marriage" as a parable of the transformative power of art, highlighting the influence of ancient myths about art on the narrative's development....
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In the following essay, Weinberger analyzes the doppelgänger motif in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," highlighting its implications about violence and sexuality.
When...
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In the essay below, Early meditates on the themes of On Boxing in literary and critical contexts, contrasting the spectacle of boxing with wrestling.
Boxing ain't the noblest of the artsȂ...
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Below, Rozga discusses the significance of Midwestern setting in Oates's short fiction, focusing on her representations of Madison, Wisconsin, and Detroit, Michigan.
Joyce Carol Oates has emplo...
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Interpretation of Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
The story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates is about a fifteen year old girl named Connie who has a strange e...
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Oates, Joyce Carol
Oates, Joyce Carol (1938—)
Joyce Carol Oates - (1938 -)
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
