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Abstract

One of the representative contemporary American writers, Joyce Carol Oates has cultivated her very unique world in various ways for the last thirty years. Among the distinctive features characterizing Oates's world are her unbelievably prolific writing, her deep concern with the diverse expressive modes running the whole gamut of literary genre, and her constant obsession with such extreme situations of human existence as violence, murder, insanity, death, and desperate love. However, the uniqueness of her world is not always so clearly distinguishable. For instance, her novel is in its thematic nature socialistic on the one hand and psychological on the other, while in the narrative style it is sometimes traditional and at others experimental. Also in the nature of literary genre her fiction is realistic in some sense and romantic in another. The purpose of this essay, which will be a kind of foundation work for understanding the nature of Oates's fiction, is to examine how these characteristics are worked out in her first three novels, With Shuddering Fall, A Garden of Earthly Delights, and Expensive People, and pave the way for the diversity of her later novels.