Shirley Jackson

by Murphy, Bernice M.

• ISBN13: 9780786423125
• ISBN10: 0786423129
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-10-30
• Publisher: McFarland Publishing

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Bernice M. Murphy lives in the Republic of Ireland.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vi
Introduction: ``Do You Know Who I Am?'' Reconsidering Shirley Jackson	1	(22)
Fallen Eden in Shirley Jackson's The Road Through the Wall	23	(11)
Joan Wylie Hall
Comic-Satiric-Fantastic-Gothic: Interactive Modes in Shirley Jackson's Narratives	34	(18)
James Egan