Tragedy Spirit

Joyce Carol Oates,a celebrated female writer in the history of contemporary American literature,is known by her tragic works revealing some thought-provoking themes and receives high praise from readers at home and abroad.Published in 2002,High Lonesome,one of the collections of her short stories which covers every creation stage of Oates is a review of Oates' s four decades of short fiction creation.Based on multiple theories of tragedy,and by using five short stories of High Lonesome as the research material,“Where are you Going,Where Have You been? ”,“In the Region of Ice”,“Four Summers”,“The Dead” and “The Lady with the Pet Dog”,this thesis attempts to explore the sublimity and inspiration in the stories and then analyze the profound significance of Oates' s tragic creation from two aspects: tragedy's formative causes and embodiments of tragic spirit.According to the tragedy theories of Raymond Williams,Karl Jaspers,Aristotle,Ren Shengming and other scholars,this thesis analyzes the tragic spirit displayed in the five stories by explaining the compromise and the sacrifice in these tragedies and the characters' tragic despair and revolts.By means of the tragic spirit,Oates not merely provides readers with positive enlightenment of life and inspires them to stand up to life filled with hardship and achieve self-transcendence unyieldingly but also expresses her attention to social problems,her praise of tragic spirit and her great longing for a good life,which makes her short stories have everlasting literary value.