In this study, Joanne V. Creighton offers the first critical study focused on the middle period of Oates's career. Included in Creighton's analysis are Oates's pseudonymous mystery novels, published under the name Rosamond Smith. The author has benefited from Oates's own response to a first draft of this study, and has ably interpreted the complexities of Oates's work. Creighton's insightful analysis will appeal to all scholars and students of contemporary American literature. Despite the imaginative richness of Oates's fictional world, . . . there is an underlying repetitiveness.
Oates is obsessed with the same subjects and situations, recast into new fictions.
Her central obsession is with the search for authentic individuality. Oates respects the other within the self, other people, and the natural world. She depicts the need to get beyond the conflicts and contradictions in our culture that would deny authentic selfhood, and she portrays the enormous difficulty of that task.