Description
Book Synopsis2021 Bram Stoker Awards(R) Nominee for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction
From the short story «The Lottery» to the masterworks The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson’s popular, often bestselling works experimented with popular generic forms (melodrama, folktale, horror, the Gothic, and the Weird) to create a uniquely apocalyptic vision of America and its contradictions.
With a Foreword by award-winning Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, this collection features comprehensive critical engagement with Jackson’s works, including those that have received less scholarly attention. Among these are the novels The Road Through the Wall, The Bird’s Nest, and Hangsaman, as well as Jackson’s historical study, The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Also included are essays on Jackson’s darkly humorous collections Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, on Stephen King’s «literary friendship» with Jackson, on the little-known film adaptations Lizzie (1957) and Hosszú Alkony (Long Twilight) (1997), and the first-ever extended analysis devoted to Jackson’s unpublished satirical cartoon sketches.
The collection’s five sections focus on Jackson’s style, key themes, and influence; her politics and poetics of space; her treatment of the «monstrous» mother and monstrousness of motherhood; her representations of outsiders and minorities; and moving-image adaptations of her work.
Trade Review«Shirley Jackson: A Companion is an enormously valuable addition to the Jackson renaissance, a collection of twenty original essays eloquently framed by editor Kristopher Woofter’s argument about Jackson’s abiding sense of the apocalyptic. Woofter has made a point of soliciting essays on Jackson’s lesser-known themes (such as race), works, and adaptations – and readers will learn something new from every chapter.» (Dawn Keetley, Professor of English, Lehigh University)
Table of ContentsContents: Reading Jackson: Style, Theme, Tradition – Ralph Beliveau: Shirley Jackson and American Folk Horror: The Public Face of Private Demons – Michael T. Wilson: «How the Dinner Revolves»: Eating, Food, and Consumption in the Fiction of Shirley Jackson – Daniel T. Kasper: The Posthumous Style of Shirley Jackson – Carl H. Sederholm: Raising Her Voice: Stephen King’s Literary Dialogue with Shirley Jackson – The Politics and Poetics of Space – Patrycja Antoszek: «Intrusions from the Outside World»: Shirley Jackson and the Politics and Poetics of Enclosure – Dara Downey: «No one Can Ever Find Me»: Gingerbread Houses in Shirley Jackson’s Fiction – Elizabeth Mahn Nollen: The «Terrible» House as Locus of Female Power in We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Michelle Kay Hansen: «Move Your Feet, Dear. I’m Conga- ing»: Drawing Circles around Domesticity in Shirley Jackson’s Cartoons – Luke Reid: Romancing the Nostalgic Future: Prophecy, Planning, and Postwar Architecture in The Sundial – Mothers and Other Monsters – Wyatt Bonikowski: Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Secret of the Mother’s Desire in The Bird’s Nest – Rebecca Million: Living an Aporia: Notes on Shirley Jackson’s Home Books and the Impossible- Possible of Motherhood – Ibi Kaslik: Hangsaman: Writing the Self in Blood at the Margins – Mikaela Bobiy: Home Is Where the Heart Is(n’t): The House as Mother in Jackson’s House Trilogy – Outsiders and Minorities – Emily Banks: Erotic Envy and the Racial Other in «Flower Garden» – Stephanie A. Graves: Wicked Creature(s): Delirium and Difference in The Witchcraft of Salem Village – Rebecca Stone Gordon: «A Lady of Undeniable Gifts but Dubious Reputation»: Reading Theodora in The Haunting of Hill House – Jackson on Film and Television – Will Dodson: «Some Disturbing Obstruction»: Lizzie from The Bird’s Nest – Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock: Walking Alone Together: Adapting Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House – Kristopher Woofter: Long Twilight (Hosszú Alkony), Shirley Jackson, and the Eerie In- Between – Erin Giannini: A Good Life?: Merricat, from Tyrant to Savior in We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Its Film Adaptation – Darryl Hattenhauer: Afterword.
