Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House

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.