War in Iran
The headlines are built on long histories and debates.
Posted on in Hot Topic
Joyce Carol Oates
Twitter icon and literary giant, Oates has always made critics talk
Posted on November 20, 2025 in Hot Topic
McGurl, Mark. The program era: postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing. Harvard, 2009. 466p ISBN 9780674033191, $35.00.
Reviewed in CHOICE November 2009
Employing engaging prose rare in scholarly books, McGurl (UCLA) offers an account of the emergence of creative writing in the American university system from the 1930s on, and of the intricate relationship between that system and postwar American fiction during its passage from modernism to postmodernism and beyond. Along the way, he provides intermittent, useful discussion of the culture and society that shaped and was shaped by the new fiction. The titles of the seven chapters do not fully reveal the contents of the book, which also touches on, for example, the aesthetics of new criticism and the voice-oriented, identity-emphasizing fictions of the 1960s-70s, when the burgeoning creative writing schools nurtured many women and minority writers. McGurl discusses an impressive number of writers, including but not limited to Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Charles Johnson, Thomas Pynchon, and Thomas Wolfe (now rarely taught). He uses scholarship well, drawing on such important texts as Ashraf Rushdy’s Neo-Slave Narratives (CH, Apr’00, 37-4355), Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism (CH, Jun’01, 38-5470), and William Paulson’s prescient The Noise of Culture (1988). Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. American literature collections, all colleges and universities.—K. Tölölyan, Wesleyan University
Short story writers: v.1: Chinua Achebe-Louise Erdrich; v.2: William Faulkner-R.K. Narayan; v.3: Joyce Carol Oates-Richard Wright; Index, ed. by Charles E. May. Rev ed. Salem Press, 2007. 3v ISBN 9781587653896, $217.00.
Reviewed in CHOICE April 2008
For this first new edition in 10 years (previous ed., CH, Feb’98, 35-3072), the editors of Short Story Writers have worked with 170 scholars to add 44 new articles and update many of the 102 original entries. A time line takes readers from the birth of Boccaccio in 1313 to the birth of Sherman Alexie in 1966. Each article reviews the works of the author, provides biographical information, and presents a critical analysis of a selection of the author’s significant works. Bibliographies of secondary sources include about ten citations, fully annotated. Many of these bibliographies have been updated. Although most authors included in this set are part of the modern tradition of short story writing, the editors provide historical context by including articles on Boccaccio, Chaucer, the Grimms, and important 19th-century authors. Most of the writers in this solid selection come from the US, and there is a thoughtful selection of writers from other countries. This book will serve readers in public and school libraries, teachers of literature, and lower-level undergraduate course work. Summing Up: Recommended. First-year undergraduates and general readers. —R. Stuhr, Grinnell College
Ingersoll, Earl G. Waiting for the end: gender and ending in the contemporary novel. Fairleigh Dickinson, 2007. (Dist. by Associated University Presses.) 286p ISBN 0838641539, $55.00; ISBN 9780838641538, $55.00.
Reviewed in October 2007
Novels by Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates, Ian MacEwan, and 16 others combine here as “clusters,” or subsets of concerns, that Ingersoll (SUNY, Brockport) plays with using postmodern, feminist, and narratological techniques. Though one misses problematic books by James Joyce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, E. M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville, readers may find delight in Ingersoll’s well-argued concern with identifying a novelistic “feminine ending,” not an Aristotelian “conquistador” (masculine) climax. Metalanguage flows with “problemetizing” and Kermode’s “tick-tock,” and the English, Canadian, and translated foci recall works by Jo-Ann Wallace, Ted Blodgett, Robert Kroetsch, Uri Margolin, and others who play with sequence and sexuality in fiction. Rejecting Freud and using Peter Brooks’ work on “psychoanalyzing” texts, along with work by Teresa de Lauretis, Roland Barthes, et al., Ingersoll posits an opposite to mannish beginning-middle-end narratives, a Lacanian real pursued by the imaginary and the symbolic. Specialists may follow, with real or imaginary enjoyment; others may ho-hum here and there, though Ingersoll writes fluently and argues well. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. —R. H. Solomon, University of Alberta
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. Dark eyes on America: the novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Louisiana State, 2005. 282p ISBN 0807129852, $46.95.
Reviewed in CHOICE July 2005
According to Cologne-Brookes (Bath Spa Univ., UK), Oates is “the nearest thing America has to a national novelist.” Citing Oates’s remark that “the great American adventure has always been one of social ascension,” the author emphasizes the extensive cultural commentary in Oates’s fiction and in so doing also draws on her essays, short stories, poems, and plays. With frequent reference to John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and other philosophers of pragmatism, the author suggests that Oates’s early tendencies toward “excessive abstraction and introspection fade from view” as her vision becomes more “outward looking” in the early 1980s with books such as Bellefleur and A Bloodsmoor Romance. Cologne-Brookes had the advantage of Oates’s “extraordinarily helpful” responses to his questions about her work. The scholarship on Oates published heretofore is significant, if fairly limited, but even a strong study like Greg Johnson’s outstanding Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (CH, Oct’98, 36-0808) benefits from updating, given the fact that Oates is so prolific. Accordingly, the present volume is particularly valuable for its treatment of Oates’s recent works–e.g., her critique of nostalgia in Broke Heart Blues and the “phenomenon of fame” in Blonde. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. —J. W. Hall, University of Mississippi
Johnson, Greg. Invisible writer: a biography of Joyce Carol Oates. Dutton, 1998. 492p ISBN 0-525-94163-0, $34.95.
Reviewed in CHOICE October 1998
Oates published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964. Since then she has become one of the most prolific major authors in the US, publishing dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, but also pursuing respectable careers as playwright, screenwriter, poet, critic, and professor (at the University of Detroit, University of Windsor, and Princeton University). A scholar, novelist, and poet himself, Johnson is ably situated to provide the first biography of this protean writer. Johnson’s surefooted guide to Oates’s fiction centers her best work in her Detroit novel, them (which won the National Book Award), but also pays careful attention to later novels (some nearly as good), which some critics have ignored because the writer has been so productive. Johnson rebuts charges that Oates has been hasty, providing ample evidence of her careful revisions, close working relationships with editors, and long hours of note taking and planning. His narrative suggests that posterity will judge Oates more kindly than her contemporaries do–and will come to value her enormous body of work, with its insightful comments on virtually every US institution. All libraries will be glad to have this book on their shelves. —C. Rollyson, Bernard M. Baruch College, CUNY
Daly, Brenda. Lavish self-divisions: the novels of Joyce Carol Oates. University Press of Mississippi, 1996. 278p ISBN 0-87805-885-0, $37.50.
Reviewed in CHOICE March 1997
Daly (Iowa State Univ.) applies Bakhtin’s theory of multivocal authorship to Oates’s numerous author-selves who examine America’s social conventions. The author spans three decades of Oates’s work, providing a feminist analysis that focuses on the changing daughter characters whose social struggles parallel Oates’s successful challenge of the “linguistic Law of the Father.” During the “anxious authorship” of the 1960s–when Oates struggled with masculine writing techniques and language–her daughter characters attempt escape from seductive, incestuous fathers. (Works discussed include With Shuddering Fall, them, and Wonderland.) The “dialogic authorship” of the 1970s includes Do with Me What You Will, Childwold, and Unholy Loves; here, wresting control of her writing, Oates distributes her authorial voice between male and female characters and her daughter characters transform their lives. The “communal authorship” of the 1980s–reflected in Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, Mysteries of Winterthurn, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, and You Must Remember This –moves mothers from the margins by establishing their importance in their daughters’ resistance to seductive fathers. Building on the author’s 1985 dissertation, this book is recommended for undergraduate libraries. —J. C. Kohl, Dutchess Community College
Wesley, Marilyn C. Refusal and transgression in Joyce Carol Oates’ fiction. Greenwood, 1993. 171p (Contributions in women’s studies, 135) ISBN 0-313-28462-8, $45.00.
Reviewed in CHOICE November 1993
At first glance, the title of this new study of some (not all; how could it?) of Oates’s stories, novellas, and novels might appear awkward. In fact, it is inevitable, given the author’s definition of “refusal” and “transgression” as strategies by which daughters and sons in Oates’s work seek to escape the confines of the familial structures that have been imposed on them. Thus, this is also by necessity a charting of the routes for Oates’s characters from relative entrapment to empowerment and liberation. Ultimately, Wesley argues that Oates is in fact a strong feminist, something evident to anyone who knows her but a fact sometimes lost on her critics, especially those of the earlier works in which supposedly “helpless” females appear. Though Wesley introduces a few diagrams to elucidate her thesis, she wears her extensive background in literary theory lightly; her prose is supple and lucid, and it is difficult to find fault more significant than her apparent failure to understand just what a race riot is. One assumes that this volume represents a slight updating of the author’s doctoral dissertation at Syracuse, also Oates’s alma mater. There is also a bibliography specific to this topic, which has now been covered with admirable thoroughness but also economy. Effective also is Wesley’s use of Oates’s unusually forthcoming commentary on her own narrational devices. A valuable addition to Greenwood’s series on women’s studies that also manages to transcend any ostensible limitations attached to that focus. Recommended. Undergraduate and up. —J. M. Ditsky, University of Windsor
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: novels of the middle years. Twayne, 1992. 142p (TUSAS, 597) ISBN 0-8057-7647-8, $21.95.
Reviewed in CHOICE November 1992
A dozen books have already been written about Joyce Carol Oates, but it is doubtful that anyone knows her work better than Joanne Creighton. Creighton has also enjoyed the unusual advantage of Oates’s having vetted her manuscript. The old canard about Oates’s having written too much too fast seems to have faded away, and yet the implications of Creighton’s subtitle are daunting; there will be even more, later, Oatesiana to consider and even Crieghton admits (refreshingly) that she has not read it all, and confines this study to a group of novels written since her first Oates study (Joyce Carol Oates, CH, Feb’80) appeared–in effect largely leaving aside the short stories, essays, poems, and occasional pieces produced during the same period. (Quite possibly no one but Oates has read all of Oates; one sighs at the thought of the segment of one’s life her work has demanded.) Of course an authorized biography of Oates is in the works, but Creighton’s first chapter is an admirably succinct introduction to Oates’s background and also to Oates’s prevailing theme of the nonexistent “self.” Creighton has also run down some fairly obscure examples of earlier criticism. Which is to say that this volume’s index, bibliography, and chronology are fairly impeccable; and that the volume, for those few libraries not already automatically ordering “TUSAS” titles, is a necessary acquisition. Sound readings apparently approved at the source. —J. M. Ditsky, University of Windsor
Lackey, Michael. The American biographical novel. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 278p bibl index ISBN 9781628926347, $120.00; ISBN 9781628926330 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9781628926354 ebook, contact publisher for price.
Reviewed in CHOICE November 2016
As a sub-genre of American literature, the biographical novel boasts a lengthy historical trajectory and also enjoys renewed interest because of writers such as Jay Parini, Thomas Pynchon, Charles Johnson, Russell Banks, Michael Cunningham, and Joyce Carol Oates—all of whom have chosen it for their ruminations on US culture. Lackey (Univ. of Minnesota, Morris) offers a compelling overview of the biographical novel, defining it as distinct from the historical novel and exploring its rich aesthetic and political promise. He traces the genre’s history in terms of both literary production and critical considerations, then offers readings of several germinal texts to assert their dual focus on depicting the past and present simultaneously and on critiquing contemporary political issues. Lackey draws on such disparate examples as Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Jay Parini’s Benjamin’s Crossing (1997), Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It (1987), and David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl (2000) to articulate an ethical vision of the truth contract biographical fiction maintains and to support its democratic promise. Used in conjunction with Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, which Lackey edited, the present volume provides a sound beginning for discussions of this important genre. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. —D. E. Magill, Longwood University