Abstract

The intricate connection between literature and society has been a subject of controversy in modern critical approaches to literary text interpretation. This study aims first to highlight two of these dominant approaches, which are called New Criticism and Cultural Poetics, then focus on the latter whose principles are the base for the analysis and interpretation of the literary text of the short story under study. Based on the theoretical principles of Cultural Poetics, the study also aims to analyse the text of Joyce Carol Oates's "Big Momma," one of the six mesmerising tales in her anthology "The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror" (2017). The study relates this short story to its social and cultural contexts exploring the societal concerns of the author about the threatening dangers inherent in contemporary American lives of young adulthood in particular. This paper also analyses a new turn in the writer's oeuvre where the gothic genre is not approached in a straightforward manner as usual but is carried further into other dimensions of surrealism and dark fantasy firmly rooted in social realism. In the selected short story, she employs bleak imagery, an irrational metaphor together with an open-ended final scene taking her story further into another realm as her new tool of the gothic genre of which she is known to be a master. The study concludes with the view that Oates's prophetic art as a whole has largely contributed to humanism promoting a re-consideration of the emotional and psychological conflicts of a whole young adult generation of the twenty-first century.