A Study Of Post-modern Gothic Writing Of Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed

Joyce Carol Oates（1938-）is an extremely talented writer who occupies an important position in the contemporary of American literature world.The long novel The Accursed is the fourth in a series of Gothic novels "Gothic Quintet" written by Oates in the 1980s.The first draft was completed in the late 1980s,but it was not published until 2013.The novel attracted widespread attention upon publication and was hailed as the world’s first postmodern Gothic novel by Stephen King,who is known as the "master of horror".In this novel,Oates combines Gothic novels with postmodern novel creation techniques,characterizes the problems existing in American postmodern society from three aspects: theme expression,image shaping and narrative strategy,and criticizes the strategy of Postmodern American conservatives to solve the existing problems of American society guided by American traditional values,Express her negative attitude towards conservative strategy.From the perspective of postmodern Gothic theory,this paper deeply analyzes and discusses the postmodern Gothic theme,image and narrative characteristics in The Accursed by using the methods of text close reading and social history research,and explores Oates’ s uniqueness in the representation and criticism of American social problems.The introduction mainly introduces Oates and his works,the research status at home and abroad,and the research significance and methods of this paper.The first chapter focuses on the literary tradition of American Gothic novels and the background of the construction of the Gothic world in Oates’ novels,confirming that The Accursed is a postmodern Gothic novel,and exploring the reasons for its production and significance.The second chapter mainly analyzes the postmodern Gothic themes in The Accursed,analyzes the inheritance of the novel to the traditional Gothic Theme and the specific performance of the novel in the theme writing of postmodern multicultural political criticism,so as to reflect Oates’ s attention to the issues of religion,race,gender,class and so on in American postmodern society,And criticism of the traditional American values adhered to by conservatives.The third chapter analyzes the postmodern Gothic image in The Accursed,showing Oates’ s uniqueness in characterization and space.At the same time,through the characters intertwined with reality and the real and illusory space images in the novel,it reveals that in the society guided by American traditional values advocated by conservatives,people will be destroyed,alienated,lose their subjectivity,and alien forces will take the opportunity to become masters;Society will become a crime capital with frequent violence,and this society will evolve into a bloody,violent and treacherous nightmare Kingdom when it reaches the extreme.It shows Oates’ negative attitude towards the traditional American values advocated by conservatives and his anxiety about the future development path of American society.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes the narrative strategy in The Accursed,and analyzes the specific application of postmodern narrative strategy in the novel from three aspects: unreliable narration,discontinuous narration and text collage.The conclusion part,on the basis of summarizing the paper,points out that Oates continues her tradition of describing social terror in her novel The Accursed,and puts forward a topic to be further explored: in the postmodern deconstruction of all ultimate values,the emphasis on terror can play a role in arousing sublimity.Oates has a large number of horror descriptions in postmodern Gothic writing,In a sense,it also reflects the efforts of post-modern aesthetic reconstruction,which has important aesthetic construction significance.