'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?': Joyce Carol Oates - Women Writers: Texts and Contexts

Publisher Marketing: Joyce Carol Oates's prize-winning story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited options of adolescent women; the tensions between mothers and daughters; the sexual victimization of women; and the American obsession with violence. Inspired by a magazine story about a serial killer, its remarkable portrait of the dreamy teenager Connie has made it a feminist classic. Connie's life anticipates the emergence of American society from the social innocence of the fifties into the harsher contemporary realities of war, random violence, and crime. The story was the basis for the movie Smooth Talk, which became the subject of much feminist debate. This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Oates's life, and authoritative text of Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? an essay by Oates on Smooth Talk, the original Life article about the serial killer, ten critical essays (including two about the film), and a bibliography. The contributors are Brenda O. Daly, Christina Marsden Gillis, Don Moser, Tom Quirk, B. Ruby Rich, R. J. R. Rockwood, Larry Rubin, Gretchen Schultz, Marie Mitchell Oleson Urbanski, Joyce M. Wegs, and Joan D. Winslow. Elaine Showalter is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She is the author and editor of many books on women's writing, including Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. A volume in the Women Writers: Texts and Contexts Series. Review Citations:

Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2010 pg. 663 (EAN 9780865380783, Paperback)

Booklist 04/01/1993 pg. 1410 (EAN 9780865380776, Hardcover)

Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/1995 pg. 487 (EAN 9780865380776, Hardcover)

Publishers Weekly 03/22/1993 (EAN 9780865380776, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Oates, Joyce Carol Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most important and well known writers and one of America s foremost writers of the short story form. She is also a regular contributor of reviews and criticism for the New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She also reads and lectures widely throughout the US, at universities and bookstores. Contributor Bio:  Showalter, Elaine Elaine Showalter is Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of "Sister' Choice: Traditions & Contradictions in American Women's Writing, The Female Malady: Women, Madness & English Culture, Sexual Anarchy: Gender & Culture at the Fin de Siecle", and "Modern American Women Writers".