Overview

2021 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Lizzie (1957) and Hosszú Alkony (Long Twilight) (1997), and the first-ever extended analysis devoted to Jackson’s unpublished satirical cartoon sketches.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.

Full Product Details

9781800790711

Table of Contents

Reviews

«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)

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)

Author Information

Kristopher Woofter teaches courses in horror, the Gothic, and the Weird tradition in literature and the moving image in the Department of English at Dawson College, Montréal, Québec. He has co-edited several collections, including American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (2021), Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition: The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond (2019), and Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (2015). He has also published essays on the series Supernatural (2020), Caitlín R. Kiernan (2019), George A. Romero (2018), pseudo-documentary (2018), The Cabin in the Woods (2014), and the Gothic documentary (2013).

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