Call for Proposals for Vol. 3, Issue 1 –Jackson & Adolescence [Due November 30]
“Her life is controlled, possessed, by a shifting set of laws that make your garden-variety savage initiation rite look like milk time in the nursery school.”–Shirley Jackson, “On Girls of Thirteen”.
Shirley Jackson wrote extensively about the experiences of teenagers and young people across her considerable body of work. In her humorous domestic fiction, she, like many post-war adults, looked on in bemused wonder at the strange rites and rituals of the newly-formed teenage demographic. In her novels and short stories, she described young people navigating the often tumultuous, occasionally traumatic, passage from childhood to adulthood (The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, “Louisia, Please Come Home”). Her depictions of teenage girls, in particular, are often deeply complex and surprisingly nuanced, especially within the context of a culture that frequently dismissed female adolescents as greedy, frivolous, superficial and ridiculous. Multifaceted and possessed of a striking emotional and intellectual depth, her adolescent characters run the gamut from the clever, resourceful narrator who outwits the Devil himself in “The Smoking Room” to the murderous Merricat Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
The depth and variety of Jackson’s treatment of adolescence is perhaps all the more surprising when we consider that she was writing in age when the teenager was still a comparatively new cultural phenomenon, with the term “teenager” only emerging in the first half of the 1940s. In those years, teens became a flash point in a range of debates and discourses generated by everyone from parents and educators to manufacturers and advertisers. An increasingly powerful consumer base and an emblem of America’s post-war prosperity, adolescents were also a source of anxiety as various authorities fretted over their rebellious attitudes, peer-focused social lives and byzantine dating practices.
In this issue, we seek to explore Jackson’s interventions in the construction of the American teenager and how her work interrogates this nascent cultural icon. In doing so, we will investigate how Jackson employed the adolescent as an avatar through which to explore broader questions of gender, power and family dynamics. We are also interested in considering how Jackson’s fictional adolescents anticipated many later trends in the development of Gothic, horror and YA fiction through her engagement with archetypes such as teenage witches, juvenile delinquents and awkward, directionless young adults.
Possible article topics include, but are not limited to:
- The representation of teenagers in Jackson’s domestic stories
- Jackson’s teenagers and magazine market
- Jackson and young adult fiction, film and/or television
- The figure of the adolescent or youth as inflected by race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.
- Adolescents and family/community power dynamics
- Adolescence and the post-World War II American context (advertising, popular culture, music, media, moral panics)
- Gothic childhood/adolescence
Abstracts of 500 words plus short author bio should be sent to [email protected] by November 30, 2024. Upon acceptance, completed articles of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by May 30, 2025 with revisions to follow.
Calls for Vol. 2, Issue 2–Jackson & Folklore [CLOSED]
In a lecture titled “Biography of a Story,” Shirley Jackson described how, in the weeks and months following the 1948 publication of her short story “The Lottery”, she received numerous letters from curious readers wishing to know “where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.” The fictional folk tradition relayed in the story took on, at least for some readers, the appearance of a grim reality, a monstrous tradition passed on through the generations in some isolated corner of New England. While the ritual described in “The Lottery” was undoubtedly conjured up from the depths of Jackson’s own imagination, she often drew heavily on themes, conventions, and language derived from folklore, fairy tales, and mythic traditions.
Further, in her 1950 story “A Visit” (also known as “The Lovely House”) Jackson imbues her nightmarish tale of domestic entrapment with characters and motifs drawn directly from fairy tales (an ancient crone; a high, forbidding tower). In other stories, such as “The Smoking Room” and “Devil of a Tale”, she plays with folkloric renditions of the Devil as a trickster, or as the victim of a superior trickster. Her most well-known collection, The Lottery, abounds with references to a folkloric figure, typically associated with popular British and American ballads, known as the Demon Lover. In her novels, too, Jackson frequently incorporates elements of folklore, with characters such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle’s Merricat Blackwood engaging in idiosyncratic forms of sympathetic magic.
In recent years, critics have also attempted to situate Jackson’s work within the tradition of folk horror, a cinematic and literary genre concerned with themes of rural isolation, perverted pagan belief systems, the weight of history and the sinister power of the landscape. Tales such as “The Summer People”, wherein a vacationing New York couple find themselves (possibly) victimized by the inhabits of small country town after making the unprecedented decision to remain after Labour Day, certainly fit with some of the key concerns of this genre.
This issue of Shirley Jackson Studies will investigate Jackson’s use of folklore, folk traditions, and fairy tales across her entire body of work. We are also interested in mapping the transformation of folkloric themes and motifs in adaptations of Jackson’s work and in tracing her influence on contemporary folk horror texts.
Possible article topics include, but are not limited to:
- Folklore in Jackson’s novels and short stories (folk tales, traditions, songs, archetypes, etc.)
- Fairy tale elements in Jackson’s work, particularly her reimagining of fairy-tale conventions and figures
- Folkloric figures in Jackson’s oeuvre (e.g., The Demon Lover, witches, etc.)
- Myth, ritual, and tradition in Jackson’s work
- Reading Jackson as folk horror
- Jackson’s influence on contemporary folk horror (film, literature, television, etc.)
Abstracts of 500 words plus short author bio should be sent to [email protected] by April 15, 2024. Upon acceptance, completed articles of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by September 30, 2024 with revisions to follow.
Call for Proposals for Vol. 2, Issue 1 –Queer(ing) Jackson [closed]
Shirley Jackson Studies, Vol. 2, Issue #1:
Queer(ing) Jackson
In his now canonical work Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, Harry M. Benshoff describes queerness as that which “opposes the binary definitions and proscriptions of a patriarchal heterosexism.” For Benshoff, “Queer can be a narrative moment, or a performance or stance which negates the oppressive binarisms of the dominant hegemony.” Queer, then, has the capacity to embody a multitude of challenging or oppositional stances, playing with or subverting gender binaries, heteropatriarchal orders, political hegemonies, and ingrained systems of meaning. Queer can be playful, daring, and defiant.
The work of Shirley Jackson has provided a wellspring of material for scholars interested in literary queerness. From her portrayal of queer, or queer-coded, relationships in novels such as Hangsaman (1951) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959) to her radical queering of the patriarchal family in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Jackson’s work repeatedly challenges binaries, creating radically different ways of being outside of the rigid social norms of mid-century America. Likewise, creators who later reimagined Jackson’s work on stage, screen and in various literary forms have often centralized queerness in unique and productive ways. In the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Theo’s queerness is rendered explicit and framed within a distinctly twenty-first-century context. Similarly, Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (2023)– the first authorized novel to take place in the world of Jackson’s 1959 original – also foregrounds the experiences of a same-sex couple. This issue of Shirley Jackson Studies seeks to explore the centrality of queerness in Jackson’s extensive body of work, as well as within the numerous adaptations and reimaginings based on that work. The issue will investigate not only themes of gender and sexuality, but broader manifestations of queerness in all its many forms.
Possible article topics might include, but are not limited to:
– Jackson and Queer Studies
– Gender and sexuality in Jackson’s work
– Queering genre
– Trans* themes in Jackson’s work
– Queer ecologies, animal studies
– Ghosts, spectralities, and queerness
– Queerness in mid-twentieth-century US culture
– Embodiment and corporeality
– Queer adaptations/queerness in adaptation
Abstracts of 500 words plus short author bio should be sent to [email protected] by October 1, 2023. If accepted, completed articles of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by March 31, 2024 with revisions to follow.
Call for Vol. 1, Issue 2–Visualizing Jackson [CLOSED]
Shirley Jackson Studies, Vol. 1, Issue 2
Visualizing Jackson
[January 23, 2023]: In her groundbreaking study A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon discusses “transcoding,” or exploring how texts, in the movement across media, genres, and forms, must adapt to a new set of representational conventions. Transposing a work from the page to a more visual format, be it stage, screen or visual arts, raises key questions about how characters, narrative devices, plot points, and ideas might be remediated according to new modes of perception or engagement.
Shirley Jackson’s work has been consistently adapted across different media: her 1954 novel The Birds Nest was filmed as Lizzie (1957) while The Haunting of Hill House (1959) became the classic horror film The Haunting (1963), before being adapted to film again in 1999 and then reimagined as the Netflix original series The Haunting of Hill House (2018). These film adaptations raise vital questions about how Jackson’s complex literary worlds might be represented on screen. How can her psychologically nuanced characters and unsettling fictional worlds be recreated in the cinematic mise-en-scène? What role might performance, costuming, set design, and editing play in conveying, visually, Jackson’s literary creations?
Beyond the screen, Jackson’s works have also been visualised in other ways. In 2022, the Bottle Alley theatre company performed a play based on We Have Always Lived in the Castle at the Neill-Cochran House Museum. Earlier, in 2016, Jackson’s grandson, the artist Miles Hyman adapted her classic short story “The Lottery” as a graphic novel, with a Grant Wood inspired Gothic sensibility. What might these distinct remediations of Jackson’s work tell us about the imaginative power of her work? Similarly, what do other visualisations of Jackson’s work–from book covers to illustrations and fan art and merchandise–tell us about how her work is received and understood?
This issue of Shirley Jackson Studies seeks to explore the startling variety of ways in which Jackson’s work has been reimagined visually, from stage to screen to comic book panel and beyond.
Possible article topics include, but are not limited to:
- Jackson and adaptation theory
- Adaptation, appropriation and remediation
- Jackson on screen
- Performing Jackson
- Book covers, marketing and paratext
- Comics and graphic novels
- Jackson and fashion
Abstracts of 500 words plus short author bio should be sent to [email protected] by April 15, 2023. Upon acceptance, completed articles of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by September 30, 2023 with revisions to follow.
Call for Inaugural Issue–The Jackson Legacy [CLOSED]
[August 15, 2022]: Ghosts, witches, devils, uncanny beings, vanished people, and other figures repressed in modern society re-emerge time and again throughout Shirley Jackson’s work. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that after decades of critical and cultural neglect, Jackson and her work have returned to haunt the popular imagination. In recent years, a spate of new adaptations based on her work – The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018) – has reignited mainstream interest in Jackson’s prodigious literary output. At the same time, new academic studies – including Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences (2016), Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House (2020), and Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021) – have ensured Jackson’s place within the scholarly canon. The publication of Ruth Franklin’s biography A Rather Haunted Life in 2016, followed by Jackson’s collected letters in 2021, along with the 2020 film Shirley (based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novelization of Jackson’s life) has also generated widespread interest in her life and work. Similarly, conferences such as the 2021’s Reading Shirley Jackson in the Twenty-First Century event and the recent formation of the Shirley Jackson Society have stimulated new discussions about Jackson’s legacy.
With these new developments in mind, Shirley Jackson Studies will publish its inaugural issue on the subject of “The Jackson Legacy.” We invite papers from scholars at all stages of their careers that explore the factors (social, cultural, material, political) informing the current popular reappraisal of Jackson’s oeuvre. We ask prospective authors to consider the reasons for the recent surge of interest in Jackson’s work at this particular moment in time, the significance of new or re-issued publications by or about Jackson, and the aesthetic, literary, and cultural significance of new adaptations of her work. We also encourage authors to consider how new theoretical frameworks might lend themselves to a reconsideration of Jackson’s works.
Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Critical and popular (re)appraisals of Shirley Jackson
- Shirley Jackson and the literary canon
- Teaching Jackson and Jackson in the classroom
- Biographical/semi-biographical works about Jackson (e.g., A Rather Haunted Life, Shirley (2020))
- Jackson and new media/streaming
- Adaptations, influences, and reimaginings
- Works neglected by the current reconsideration of her work (e.g., her magazine writing, domestic fiction, children’s writing)
- New critical perspectives (literary theory, film/adaptation studies, queer theory, critical race theory, gender studies)
- Recovering suppressed or marginalized identities in Jackson’s work (i.e., people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals)
Abstracts of 500 words plus short author bio should be sent to [email protected] by October 1, 2022. Upon acceptance, completed articles of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by March 31, 2023.
