SOURCE: "The Nightmare of Reality: Gothic Fantasies and Psychological Realism in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates," in Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Kristiaan Versluys, Rodopi, 1992, pp. 131-43.

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. It is the record of an artist's psychic experience, his attempt to explain something to himself: and in the process of explaining it to himself, he explains it to others." This statement by Joyce Carol Oates comes from her introduction to a collection of contemporary American short fiction which she edited under the title Scenes From American Life. While the title of the short story collection could easily serve as a very general description of Ms. Oates' own wide ranging, prolific oeuvre—an exploration of widely differing scenes from American life—her...