Abstract

Deadly Girls' Voices, Suspense, and the "Aesthetics of Fear" in Joyce Carol Oates's "The Banshee" and "Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi"

Highlights

  • Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.usfca.edu/jcostudies Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons

  • “Personifying ‘evil’—like personifying ‘good’—is a human attempt to exert control over the incalculable and impersonal forces of nature of which we are a part, but only an infinitesimal part” (AF1 184). This extract from Joyce Carol Oates’s 1998 essay “The Aesthetics of Fear” sheds light on her predilection for dark creatures of all kinds that proliferate in her fiction, in her short stories

  • “The Banshee” and “Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi”—first published separately in 2003 and later included in The Female of the Species, a collection published in 2006 with the subtitle Tales of Mystery and Suspense—are no exceptions. There is another essential dimension to the stories, namely “parodic intertextuality,” as Linda Hutcheon calls it (127), which is quite specific to Oates’s writing

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Summary

Introduction

Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.usfca.edu/jcostudies Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons. It is true that Truffaut is talking about cinema and not literature,5 yet “involving the audience,” that is for Oates the readers, is exactly what she does in her stories “The Banshee” and “Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi.”

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