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Night-Side

GREG JOHNSON (ESSAY DATE 1994)

SOURCE: Johnson, Greg. "The Power of Allusion, the Uses of Gothic: Experiments in Form and Genre." In Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 68-93. New York: Twayne, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Johnson examines Oates's treatment of the Gothic in her works, particularly in the 1977 short story collection, Night-Side.

Night-Side

The attempt to define and evaluate literary Gothicism has created an ongoing controversy among critics and scholars, primarily because the term "Gothic" has achieved the kind of connotative vagueness—rather like that other free-floating term "Romantic"—that inspires its use in a startling variety of contexts. In 1969, Oates observed that "Gothicism, whatever it is, is not a literary tradition so much as a fairly realistic assessment of modern life,"¹ and in 1980 she added that...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Joyce Carol Oates (Story Date 1996)
4. General Commentary
   1. James Egan (Essay Date 1990)
5. Title Commentary
   1. Night-Side
6. Further Reading

1. Joyce Carol Oates