Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales

Joan Passey is Lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK, where she has taught since 2016. She has published on Shirley Jackson in Women’s Studies, introduced the biopic Shirley for 70+ Curzon cinemas nationwide, and participated in a Q&A to promote Shirley with Birds Eye View. Robert Lloyd is a teacher and researcher at Cardiff University, UK, and specializes in women’s literature, the supernatural, and critical theory. He completed his thesis on Shirley Jackson and spectrality in 2021, is in the process of preparing his monograph, and has published on Jackson in Women’s Studies.

[Shirley Jackson's] short fiction has now finally received book-length attention for the first time in decades with reconsiderations by 13 essayists from around the world in Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales ... Recommended [for] lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

• I. Influence and Inheritance ‘A Relator of Stories’: Supernatural Presences in Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus (1681) and the Short Fiction of Shirley Jackson – Miranda Corcoran (University College Cork, Ireland)‘The most seductive of mirages’: The Weird American Dream in Selected Short Stories by Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates - Joseph Norman (Brunel University, UK)Demon lovers, Bluebeard's wives: Folkloric intertexts and horror in Jackson and Machado – Erika Kvistad (University of South-East Norway, Norway)Negotiating Witchcraft in Shirley Jackson’s Short Fiction – Dara Downey (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)II. Bodies and Minds Nightmares, Neurosis and Clinical Psychology in the Short Stories of Shirley Jackson – Alice Vernon (Aberystwyth University, UK)Meeting the Devil: Diabolic Influence and Diabolic Resistance in Shirley Jackson’s James Harris Stories – Robert Zipser (Independent Researcher, USA)‘Missing’ Women: Spectral Displacement in Shirley Jackson’s Short Fiction – Robert Lloyd (Cardiff University, UK) III. Space and PlaceInto the Gothic Wilderness: The (Un)natural World in ‘Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons’ and ‘The Man in the Woods’ – Alissa Burger (Culver-Stockton College, USA)The Anxious City in Shirley Jackson’s ‘Pillar of Salt’ and ‘The Tooth’: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny – Luke Reid (Dawson College, Canada)On her way to the grocery store: shopping, alienation and the lost housewife in Shirley Jackson’s short stories – Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)IV. Genre and Form ‘I Could Do With a Change’: Shirley Jackson’s Engagement with Postwar Science Fiction – Janice Lynne Deitner (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)‘This Gloomy Kind of Story:’ Shirley Jackson’s Conte Cruels and the Horror Tale in the Post-Pulp Era – Kevin Knott (Frostburg State University, USA)Myth and Ritual in Shirley Jackson’s Short Fiction – Samantha Landau (University of Tokyo, Japan)Bibliography Index