Monthly Archives: February 2022

Reading Shirley Jackson in the 21st Century Symposium

Samantha Landau (The University of Tokyo, Japan) contributed a video lecture to the asynchronous portion of the Reading Shirley Jackson in the 21st Century Symposium, which was held through Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and organized by Janice Deitner, Dara Downey, Stephen Matterson, and Bernice M. Murphy. The conference is dedicated to discussing and exploring the past and future of Jackson studies, as well as celebrating the life of the author herself. Academics and independent scholars from several countries were invited to contribute video lectures and short essays to the website; a synchronous component including round tables and panels was also featured.

The conference materials, including the live panels, were made free and open to the public, and were featured in The Irish Times in an article emphasizing the importance of Jackson’s literary legacy here

The conference website contains the asynchronous content and and recordings of the live panels that took place on December 14, 2021 and can be found here

Samantha Landau’s lecture, “Ritual and Contagion in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House” is available to the public on Youtube here

These Violent Delights

These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong. Young adult gothic-adjacent or Asian horror novels, these books retell something of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet story in the “melting-pot” of 1920s Shanghai. The young heirs of opposing Chinese and Russian emigree gangs do battle on city streets and across the foreign concessions. Then a bloody pandemic rages, leaving yet more mutilated corpses in the streets, that might require two dominating fathers ‘both alike in dignity’ and their extended families to cooperate towards a solution before their lucrative rackets collapse. Elements for dystopian and speculative fiction readers too (Sarah Olive, Bangor).