Word: bellefleur
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...leap into outer space with her multivolume chronicle of "galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor Romance, like the author's 1980 Bellefleur, is intended to poke fun at gushy Victorian women novelists and such latter-day descendants as Barbara Cartland, Victoria Holt and Rosemary Rogers...
...many ways this book seems to develop Oates last novel, Bellefleur, another family chronicle which mixed the fantastic with the in a romantic setting. The fully realized vision of what was attempted in that novel however presents itself clearly here. In addition to fleshing out more detailed and sympathetic characters, Oates adds authenticity through extensive research and the use of actual period pieces within the text such as The Ladies Wreath (1847). The wedding day Book (1882), and Psychical Research Science and Religion (1925). The almost unimaginable scope of plot and characters contributes as well leaving the reader dazed...
...FICTION: Bellefleur, Joyce Carol Oates Consenting Adults or The Duchess Will Be Furious, Peter De Vries∙Joshua Then and Now, Mordecai Richler ∙Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote Rough Strife, Lynne Sharon Schwartz∙The Magic Labyrinth, Philip Jose Farmer∙The Second Coming, Walker Percy
...have no choice but to be Americans now," says Raphael Bellefleur, descendant of French aristocrats and now the owner of a baronial estate in the New World. But what is an American? The question has provoked writers as diverse as Henry James and Gertrude Stein, and it haunts Joyce Carol Oates throughout this vast seven-generation epic. That is not all that haunts her. Oates' twelfth novel informs the occult with Freudian insights. Boys change into hounds, men into bears; a man, swallowed by a great flood, returns decades later to be recognized only by his 100-year...
...past, Oates' touch has often been too heavy to sustain her fantasies. Ironically, in the barocco world of Bellefleur she is deft and self-assured. Even her contrived ending cannot mar a work that immeasurably enriches the 200-year-old tradition of the gothic novel...