6
Biography, Literature & Literary Studies
Comparative Literature
Kristopher Woofter (eds.)
Marco Malvestio
Shirley Jackson
The Conflict Revisited
A Companion
The Second World War in Post-Postmodern Fiction
Oxford, 2021. XVIII, 328 pp., 37 fig. col., 12 fig. b/w.
Oxford, 2021. VIII, 222 pp.
Genre Fiction and Film Companions. Vol. 7
New Comparative Criticism. Vol. 10
pb. • ISBN 978-1-80079-071-1 CHF 39.– / €D 32.95 / €A 32.50 / € 30.90 / £ 25.– / US-$ 37.95
pb. • ISBN 978-1-78997-209-2 CHF 70.– / €D 59.95 / €A 61.20 / € 55.60 / £ 45.– / US-$ 67.95
eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-1-80079-072-8 CHF 39.– / €D 32.95 / €A 32.50 / € 30.90 / £ 25.– / US-$ 37.95
eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-1-78997-210-8 CHF 70.– / €D 58.95 / €A 58.40 / € 55.60 / £ 45.– / US-$ 67.95
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 awardwinning 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Lizzie (1957) and Hosszú Alkony (Long Twilight) (1997), and the first-ever extended analysis devoted to Jackson’s unpublished satirical cartoon sketches.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.
This book traces the development of literary poetics after postmodernism and outlines the most important features of what is defined here as «postpostmodernism». This new literary form simultaneously recovers the characteristics of the traditional novel and abandons the ironic approach of postmodernism, while also retaining some postmodern narrative devices such as autofiction and metafiction. To render the global dimension of this phenomenon, this book focuses on the theme of the Second World War, an increasingly pivotal subject for historical novels in the twenty-first century worldwide. The study analyses the work of a variety of authors from several national literatures, focusing mainly on Roberto Bolaño, William T. Vollmann and Jonathan Littell, and drawing comparison with other authors, such as Rachel Seiffert, Sarah Waters, Laurent Binet, Ian McEwan and Giorgio Falco.
