Editor's Note

Introduction
Harold Bloom

The Artificial Demon: Joyce Carol Oates and the Dimensions of the Real
Walter Sullivan

Sleeping Beauty and the Love Like Hatred
Calvin Bedient

Joyce Carol Oates, Artist in Wonderland
Gordon O. Taylor

Joyce Carol Oates's Wonderland: An Introduction
G. F. Waller

Autonomy and Influence: Joyce Carol Oates's Marriages and Infidelities
Eileen T. Bender

The Terrified Women of Joyce Carol Oates
Mary Allen

With Shuddering Fall and the Process of Individuation
Rose Marie Burwell

The Strange Real World
John Gardner

The House of Atreus Now
Thomas R. Edwards

Modes of Survival
Frederick R. Karl

Joyce Carol Oates: Contending Spirits
Samuel Chase Coale

Joyce Carol Oates: A Portrait
Elaine Showalter

Chronology
Contributors
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Dust-Jacket Blurb

Recognized as one of the most versatile of contemporary American writers, Joyce Carol Oates has long been noted for the violent themes of her art. Deeply concerned with victims of economic deprivation and physical abuse, Oates creates characters who are at times dominated by their drives while at others they yield to circumstances and make compromises. Although Oates is an extremely prolific writer, having produced at least one novel and several short stories a year in the past decade, there significant differences between the social realism of them, and early major effort, and the fantasy of Bellefleur, published in 1980, or the emotional intensity of her most recent novel, Marya: A Life.

This volume gathers together a representative selection of the best recent criticism devoted to the works of Oates. Mary Allen traces Oates's moving sense of "terrified women," Samuel Chase Gordon considers Bellefleur to be her masterwork, and Ellen G. Friedman sees Oates as a great affirmer of the life force in Childwold.

Excerpt

What I myself find most moving in Oates is her immense empathy with the insulted and injured, her deep identification with the American lower classes. She is not a political novelist, not a social revolutionary in any merely overt way, and yet she is our true proletarian novelist.