Shirley Jackson and Domesticity - by Jill E Anderson & Melanie R Anderson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Shirley Jackson and Domesticity takes on American horror writer Shirley Jackson's domestic narratives - those fictionalized in her novels and short stories as well as the ones captured in her memoirs - to explore the extraordinary and often supernatural ways domestic practices and the ecology of the home influence Jackson's storytelling.

Examining various areas of homemaking - child-rearing and reproduction, housekeeping, architecture and spatiality, the housewife mythos - through the theoretical frameworks of gothic, queer, gender, supernatural, humor, and architectural studies, this collection contextualizes Jackson's archive in a Cold War framework and assesses the impact of the work of a writer seeking to question the status quo of her time and culture.

Review Quotes

Shirley Jackson and Domesticity is a welcome and much-needed contribution to the critical conversation on Shirley Jackson's fiction and the cultural and political milieu in which she was writing. This wide-ranging collection is particularly laudable for the close attention it gives to Jackson's frequently overlooked short fiction, her quasi-autobiographical 'family chronicles' (often dismissed as overly optimistic and lacking depth), and The Sundial, a delightfully catty response to Cold War-era apocalyptic fears. By highlighting the continuities as well as the disjunctions with Jackson's wide-ranging oeuvre, the volume undertakes the important work of ensuring that 'The Lottery' and her most famous novels are placed side by side with her more neglected works, and that the latter are given the attention and rigorous analysis that they have long deserved.
Dara Downey, Visiting Lecturer/Researcher in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and author of American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (2014)

Shirley Jackson and Domesticity makes compelling arguments about role of gender and domesticity within the work of one of the 20th century's most indelible writers. A thoroughly entertaining and insightful collection, this book leaves me eager to revisit and more deeply explore Jackson's stories and essays.
Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) and The Cabin at the End of the World (2018)

In these thoughtful essays, Shirley Jackson's uncanny narratives emerge as canny reflections on mid-century social concerns. Thus, her 'domestic gothic' includes nuclear threat, suburban dislocation, fraught gender dynamics, and other postwar anxieties shadowing the home and the woman who is so often trapped inside.
Joan Wylie Hall, Senior Lecturer of English, University of Mississippi, USA, and author of Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993)

About the Author

Jill E. Anderson is Associate Professor in English at Tennessee State University, USA.

Melanie R. Anderson is Assistant Professor of English at Delta State University, USA. She is the author of Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2013) and co-editor of The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (2013) and Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016).