ENGL 1020 Novella Research Toolkit

Argues that Jackson's anticipation of postmodernism ranks her among the most significant writers of her time. Best known for her short story'The Lottery'and her novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson produced a body of work that is more varied and complex than critics have realized. In fact, as Darryl Hattenhauer argues here, Jackson was one of the few writers to anticipate the transition from modernism to postmodernism, and therefore ranks among the most significant writers of her time. The first comprehensive study of all of Jackson's fiction, Shirley Jackson's American Gothic offers readers the chance not only to rediscover her work, but also to see how and why a major American writer was passed over for inclusion in the canon of American literature.

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, and 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.