The Internet Book Database of Fiction

#	Date	Publisher	Binding	Cover
1	1983-00-00	Dutton

Blurb:: W.H. Auden has said, "The value of a profane thing lies in what it usefully does, the value of a sacred thing lies in what it is." In this collection of critical essays and reviews, Joyce Carol Oates brings us fourteen of her finest pieces on literary and cultural figures, imaginatively adhering to Auden"s dictum that good criticism exists not in and for itself but as a service to art. Highly regarded as both a novelist and an essayist, Oates brings to this, her fourth collection, an approach unique among critics today as she turns her critical eye upon distinguished fellow writers with a sensitivity and insightfulness born of kindred experience. Her discussions of such major writers as John Updike, Emily Bronte, Saul Bellow, Lewis Carroll, Flannery O"Connor, and Anne Sexton, among others, not only illuminate each of these authors" varied efforts but provide a valuable perspective on the achievement of our literature as a whole. Of particular interest are three substantial essays, "Imaginary Cities: America," concerning the city "as a text"; "At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her": Images of Women in Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner"; and "Notes on Failure," in which Oates shows how failure and the fear of failure have haunted and provoked writers through the ages. Eloquent and discerning, these essays and reviews confirm Oates"s pre-eminent position among major American critics.