In the following essay, Cunningham examines the themes of self-enclosure and identity in Oates's first five volumes of short stories.

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.”

In the following essay, Trachtenberg provides a thematic analysis of the seven stories in The Hungry Ghosts.

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 'otherness' in her fiction.

In the following essay, Dörfel discusses aspects of Oates's short stories set in or alluding to Germany.

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.”

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 her dozens of subsequent books, but also contains several stories that remain among her finest.”

In the following essay, Kozikowski investigates Oates's use of the Cinderella motif in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

In the following essay, Chauche asserts that “Our Wall,” “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and “Lamb of Abyssalia” “go through the stages of the imperceptible passage from history to mythology.”

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 a background of Roman Catholicism and father-daughter incest.

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.

In the essay below, Early meditates on the themes of On Boxing in literary and critical contexts, contrasting the spectacle of boxing with wrestling.

In the following essay, Loeb compares Oates's “The Spiral” to Gustave Flaubert's outline for an unpublished novel, La

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.”

In the following essay, Zviniatskovsky contrasts Oates's “The Lady with the Dog” with the original version by Anton Chekhov.

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 has been attentive to the potential of narrative to transform gender roles.”

In the following essay, Saalmann explores the symbolism of the Berlin Wall in Oates's “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Our Wall.”

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 between literature and composition.

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 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Below, Rozga discusses the significance of Midwestern setting in Oates's short fiction, focusing on her representations of Madison, Wisconsin, and Detroit, Michigan.

Below, Manske details conventions of Gothicism and realism in Oates's fiction, emphasizing the breadth and violence of her representation of American life.

In the following essay, Stout discusses the motif of passivity in Do with Me What You Will as a key element of stereotypical femininity.

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'Connor's “Greenleaf.”

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 recurrence of violence in her work, and her personal literary philosophy.

In the following essay, Zapf delineates the three main aspects of the aesthetic composition of Oates's “Master Race.”

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.

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 a lack of self-criticism. Her poems … are often jagged and metrically uncertain, and sometimes over-packed with superfluous words; but frequently they can crystallize with electrifying clarity inexplicable moments of experience on the edge of fear, despair, terror, or joy. Many read, in fact, like passionate footnotes to her stories o...

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.

In the following essay, McPhillips surveys the central thematic concerns of Oates's early novellas.

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.

In the following essay, Wesley surveys Oates's later fiction to describe the function of "the transgressive other" in her narrative technique.

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.

In the essay below, Wesley explains how Oates's fiction challenges gender ideology by describing the characterization of the protagonist of "Stalking."

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's female characters, in particular, are born into a hostile world that fails to nurture them. Rejecting the lives of their unhappy mothers, they long to forge a more meaningful existence for themselves. However, few life options seem available to Oates's women. Most seek fulfillment through sexual relationships, or marriage and mot...

[The Wheel of Love] has thematic unity: focusing exclusively on the emotional complexity of human relationships, the collection offers a rich—if distressing—view of the mysterious, volatile, and disorienting power of love. But the very obsessiveness of this thematic emphasis may contribute to the reader's disaffection with Oates. The reader is overcome with fatigue, bombarded as he is with repeated instances of unrelieved emotional misery. Moreover, he is likely to lose sight of the wel...

In the review below, Janeway draws thematic parallels between A Garden of Earthly Delights and Theodore Dreiser's fiction.

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 departure from the conventional practice of relatively short titles. The headnote for the story provides a further hint as to the experimental quality of what is to follow: "Notes for an essay for an English class at Baldwin Country Day School; poking around in debris; disgust and curiosity; a revelation of the meaning of life; a happy end...

To view Oates' fiction in retrospect is to be surprised that what seemed to be basically "realistic" fiction has so many variations, and shows such range of experimentation, such wealth of literary antecedent. But whether she writes a comic Expensive People, an impressionistic Childwold, or that strangely heightened realism of them and the short stories, her interest is less in technical innovation than it is in trying the border between the real and the illusory, in testing the space i...

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 awareness of the horrors of human existence and a resulting growth of her spiritual nature.”

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 moral investigation."

Fifteen-year-old Connie's acquiescence to Arnold Friend's threat-ridden seduction is an appropriate finale to Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" in a narrative which, upon careful analysis, suggests existential allegory. Many critics have classified Oates's work as realistic or naturalistic, whereas Samuel J. Pickering categorizes her short stories as subjective romanticism to a fault [see CLC, Vol. 6]. Most, however, agree she is writin...

Below, Cassill calls Expensive People "a prophetic novel," alluding to several literary precedents.

In the review below, Bader elucidates the feminist themes of Foxfire, noting the questions raised by the text.

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 mean, the world of Richard Everett [the narrator] is as much a "fiction" as the fiction he self-consciously tries to write. The result is a parody of the reflexive mode, a book about the making of such books. It is also a Nabokovian romp in the art-and-craft of confessional narration…. As in all novels built upon the struc...

In the following review, Joseph comments on the plot, themes, and characters of With Shuddering Fall.

["Unholy Loves"] opens with a welcoming party, a scene of jealous, strained, fairly poisoned attentiveness, the characteristic swarming of small academics around a Great Name. In his 71st year, the British poet Albert St. Dennis has come to Woodslee College as Distinguished Professor of Poetry. (p. 9) At once a flickering, erratic presence and a profound central absence, St. Dennis serves well as a ruthless exposer of those around him. His evasions madden and embolden the Woodslee faculty, his...

["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 practice of Pentecostal religion. It explores the phenomenon of "revelation" and mystical experience with an extraordinary imaginative thrust. It poses, without answering, questions about the nature of Christ, the church as an institution, and whether there is God or only the desire for God, leading to madness; and whether He is a God...

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; or the monologue of a dead woman dragged out of a river; a man having a heart attack; or, in one of the book's stronger poems, a flooding river tearing the dead out of the cemetery earth in a soggy dark resurrection. Violence is not so much the subject of those poems as it is their element. A groundswell of violent images carries the...

[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 infidelities"; the scene that of her home town (Windsor, Ontario) on the United States-Canada Border…. At this political junction (between Windsor and Detroit, Lake Erie and Lake Huron) she plots a series of emotional junctures that also evoke "natural borders". At all such borders travellers, she insists, must co...

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 way harps on such sensitivity but simply and hardheadedly puts it to work. And surrounds it with other good, solid virtues, neither feminine nor unfeminine, such as looking at the world steadily and long, and blinking only when absolutely necessary. (p. 284) [It] is with mixed pleasure and apprehension that I watch Miss Oates wildly sowing h...

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 Sentimental Education," as in her other fiction, are most often the urban and suburban Middle West and East Coast, she is not a regional writer. Her characters speak with the recognizable monotony of those whose inherited accents have been worn down by an indifferent education, mediocre journalism and exposure through radio and televi...

In our age of "born-again" Christianity, of neofascism under the banner of biblical truth,… it is not surprising that Joyce Carol Oates's ninth novel, Son of the Morning—which deals with an "inspired" evangelical preacher named Nathanael Vickery—should be her most ironic work of fiction to date, and perhaps her most broodingly serious. Like her earlier masterpiece, Wonderland …, it attempts no less than a thorough analysis of our culture; while ...

[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 coming…. Oates has never shied away from important matters of the day. Though she can become much too elaborate in statements about her fiction, I believe she feels a direct responsibility to her readers to perform as a worthy recorder of the times. What sustains Oates's novels is not her journalistic coverage of migrant workers,...

The solemn domestic absorption of many of Joyce Carol Oates's stories seems narcissistic,… though this prolific and highly acclaimed author often writes well and, of course, her concerns are … obviously up-to-date: the imposition and effects of sex-roles, especially in marriage; the plight of the educated, jobless wife; adultry-drift; and so on. Half of the 15 stories in [Crossing the Border] form a fragmented novel about a couple who have left the States for Canada, so that Evan, a res...

Unholy Loves is a mockingly overheated title announcing the novel's satiric fascination with the passions of Academe. Passion—or perhaps choler—is what attends the faculty of Humanities at Woodslee College when aged Albert St. Dennis takes up residence as Distinguished Professor of Poetry. That he will not be what he seems … allows Oates to dramatize her game of appearance and reality and to play it with the envious faculty as well. She plays it expertly. Unholy Loves is brillian...

[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 transplants from the genre…. All six stories are plotless rambles through emotional terrain as bleak and autumnal as the settings in which they are cast. (p. 72)

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 mysterious realm of the paranormal." [It] differs considerably from her early novels in that almost all the violence is mental rather than actual…. [These] are interior tales—stories of individuals haunted by their own uneasinesses and anxieties. What is striking is how Ms. Oates manages to reconstruct the dreams and nightmares whi...