Chronology

1. Variation on an American Hymn
2. The Ordeal of Initiation: With Shuddering Fall
3. World Alienation: A Garden of Earthly Delights
4. The Gluttons Dream America: Expensive People
5. Shakespeare's Horatio as the Type for Joyce Carol Oates's Representative Man: them
6. The Journey from the "I" to the "Eye": Wonderland
7. Crime-Crossed Lovers: Do With Me What You Will
8. Toward Pluralism: The Assassins: A Book of Hours
9. Epilogue: With an examination of Son of the Morning

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Dust-Jacket Blurb

No one captures the alienated world of an unvarnished America more intensely than Joyce Carol Oates in her novels. Nine of her novels are scrutinized here—from With Shuddering Fall to Son of the Morning—for what they tell us about our lives and hopes and about Oates herself. Elements of the writer's life and the influences on her thinking and her art are woven into an enlightening picture of one of the most versatile of our major novelists.

For anyone who has read Oates and fallen under her spell this valuable study offers new insights into this major American writer.

Excerpt

Characteristically, Oates's novels begin nearly as paradigms of American history. As America loosed its bonds from England, Oates's protagonists find themselves by a variety of routes free from the strictures of family, place, and history. Yet when they attempt to follow the imperatives of the self, they inevitably confront chaos, madness, or death. In the romance tradition of American fiction, many of Oates's characters strain to escape the world in which they find themselves, but they are repeatedly defeated. To survive, they are forced to acknowledge the world and respect its limits. Wonderland, for instance, begins with Jesse Harte's escape from his father's murderous gunfire. Orphaned because his father has committed suicide after murdering his family, Jesse undergoes a series of experiences, each representing a period or aspect of American history and culture, that cause him to withdraw further and further into himself, to depend solely on the sufficiency of the self. In the end, however, he comes to full, human consciousness by virtue of an act of rescue and love. The overflow of the self to the world, implied by his act of rescue and love, is made a condition of his awakening from the solipsistic nightmare of his freedom.