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The Wheel of Love and Other Stories

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First edition

The Wheel of Love is contains 20 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published by Vanguard Press in 1970.[1] The volume brought Oates "abundant national acclaim" [2] including this assessment from librarian and critic John Alfred Avant: "Quite simply, one of the finest collections of short stories ever written by an American."[3][4][5]

While the book itself is out of print, several of the stories—"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", "Unmailed, Unwritten Letters", "In the Region of Ice", and "Wild Saturday"—have been included in other collections and anthologies. It was a finalist for the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Stories[6]

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Those stories first appearing in literary journals are indicated.[7]

Reception

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Writing in The New York Times, literary critic Richard Gilman praised Oates for her "clean narrative line," her "almost photographic eye," and "a concern with some central human issues and conditions" dealing with both family and feminist issues. Gilman observes that these stories are "colder and harder" and concern "love’s failures."[8] Gilman reserves special commendation for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and "Four Summers," stories which "create a verbal excitement, a sense of language used not for the expression of previously attained insights or perceptions but for new imaginative reality."[9]

Critical appraisal

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Margaret Groppi Rozga states that it represents a further development in her fiction in so far as "the characters are now almost always urban, rather than rural, people and are financially established, rather than threatened with poverty."[10] But most important is the further developed consciousness of the characters in The Wheel of Love in comparison to the characters in Oates's first two volumes of short fiction:

What is most noticeable in The Wheel of Love, Oates' third collection of stories, is how much more conscious and self-conscious some of these characters are, or become in the course of their stories. Foremost in their consciousness is a sense of incongruity, an awareness of the contradictions in their lives and in the world around them. Their consciousness is consciousness of pain, of danger, of how little they are what they would be. These characters have no answers to the problems of which they are conscious. But their consciousness gives them more sense of themselves as individuals, separate from but in some ways related to the world around them, and, most important, because they are not so self-absorbed, then, they are not so thoughtless of others, a major change almost unacknowledged in the commentaries on Oates' fiction.[11]

References

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  1. ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 218-222: Selected Bibliography, Primary Works
  2. ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 4
  3. ^ Avant, 1970
  4. ^ "On the Rack". Time. October 26, 1970. Archived from the original on October 30, 2010. Retrieved 2009-01-14.
  5. ^ Champion, Laurie (2002). Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide. books.google.com: Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 269. ISBN 9780313316272.
  6. ^ "The Glass Ark: A Joyce Carol Oates Bibliography". Retrieved 2022-10-23.
  7. ^ Lercangee, 1996, See Short Stories and Tales, pp. 7-47
  8. ^ Gilman, 1970
  9. ^ Gilman, 1970
  10. ^ Rozga, Margaret Groppi (1977). Development in the Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates. Diss., University of Wisconsin. p. 145.
  11. ^ Rozga, Margaret Groppi (1977). Development in the Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates. Diss., University of Wisconsin. pp. 7–8.

Sources

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