Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House

About the Author
Jill E. Anderson is Associate Professor in English at Tennessee State University, USA. Her work has appeared in Women's Studies, Margaret Atwood Studies, and the Journal of Ecocriticism, and she is currently at work on a book project tentatively titled Homemaking for the Apocalypse: Domestic Horror in the Atomic Age.
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 coeditor of The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities (2013) and Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016).
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.