Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson was one of America's most prominent female writers of the 1950s. Between 1948 and 1965 she published six novels, one best-selling story collection, two popular volumes of her family chronicles and many stories, which ranged from fairly conventional tales for the women's magazine market to the ambiguous, allusive, delicately sinister and more obviously literary stories that were closest to Jackson's heart and destined to end up in the more highbrow end of the market.
Most critical discussions of Jackson tend to focus on "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House. An author of such accomplishment--and one so fully engaged with the pressures and preoccupations of postwar America--merits fuller discussion. To that end, this collection of essays widens the scope of Jackson scholarship with new writing on such works as The Road through the Wall and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and topics ranging from Jackson's domestic fiction to ethics, cosmology, and eschatology. The book also makes newly available some of the most significant Jackson scholarship published in the last two decades.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     
Introduction: "Do You Know Who I Am?" Reconsidering Shirley Jackson      
1. Fallen Eden in Shirley Jackson's The Road Through the Wall
Joan Wylie Hall     
2. Comic-Satiric-Fantastic-Gothic: Interactive Modes in Shirley Jackson's Narratives
James Egan     
3. Multiple Personality and the Postmodern Subject: Theorizing Agency
Marta Caminero-Santangelo     
4. New World Miniatures: Shirley Jackson's The Sundial and Postwar American Society
Rich Pascal     
5. "The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us": Shirley Jackson's New England Gothic
Bernice M. Murphy     
6. House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and the Female Gothic
Roberta Rubenstein           
7. "Whose Hand Was I Holding?": Familial and Sexual Politics in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House
Tricia Lootens     
8. Shirley Jackson and the Reproduction of Mothering: The Haunting of Hill House
Judie Newman     
9. Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror
S.T. Joshi     
10. The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Lynette Carpenter     
11. King of the Castle: Shirley Jackson and Stephen King
Dara Downey and Darryl Jones     
12. Chambers of Yearning: Shirley Jackson's Use of the Gothic
John G. Parks     
13. Stephen Spielberg's The Haunting: A Reconsideration of David Self''s Script
Darryl Hattenhauer     
14. Life Lessons in Shirley Jackson's Late Fiction: Ethics, Cosmology, Eschatology
Diane Long Hoeveler     

Appendix: Shirley Jackson Bibliography     
About the Contributors     
Index