SOURCE: Daly, Brenda. “Sexual Politics in Two Collections of Joyce Carol Oates's Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 1 (winter 1995): 83-93.

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.”

There is little question that Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's greatest writers of short fiction, but as Greg Johnson comments in “A Barbarous Eden,” the nature of her contribution to the genre has yet to be fully explored. Furthermore, critical attention to a few frequently anthologized stories tends to obscure the fact that Oates carefully arranges almost all of her short stories in collections. As she explains in “Stories That Define Me,” at the age of 14 she discovered the...