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Copyright Irish Journal of Gothic & Horror Studies Summer 2014

Abstract

[...]The New Yorker's miniature Jackson revival acknowledges and extends the platform which, as her biographer Judy Oppenheimer details at some length, paid enough for her writing to allow her to be the primary breadwinner of the Jackson-Hyman household.2 I dwell on this publishing tradition at length because, in many ways, 'the medium is the message', as Jackson's contemporary Marshall McLuhan put it in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964); I would argue that the shock value of Jackson's fiction is heightened by the fragmented, multifarious nature of a magazine's content. [...]he comes across a small cottage at the end of the road he's been following, this is the extent of the information we are given about him, except that he has travelled far, but is unsure about where he has come from, where he is, or where he hopes to go. Merging this smothering-house motif with the mythic resonances of 'The Lottery', this newly unearthed story crystallises many of the concerns central to Jackson's writing, as Christopher becomes embroiled in an age-old ritual that is indifferent to his status as an individual, seeking only to draw him into its endlessly repeating cycles of death and renewal, violence and shelter, magic and domesticity. 3 First published in The New Yorker on 26 June 1948, the story generated an unprecedented number of complaint letters to the magazine in the weeks that followed. 4 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) is a useful reference point in this regard. 5 Laurence Jackson Hyman, interviewed by Cresside Leyshon, The New Yorker, 21 April 2014, <http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tumer/this-week-in-fiction-shirley-jackson> [accessed 4 August 2014].

Details

Title
The Man in the Woods
Author
Downey, Dara
Pages
117-121
Publication year
2014
Publication date
Summer 2014
Publisher
Irish Journal of Gothic & Horror Studies
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1660315947
Copyright
Copyright Irish Journal of Gothic & Horror Studies Summer 2014