On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett
Autor Ashley Lawsonen Limba Engleză Hardback – 21 sep 2024
Ashley Lawson’s On Edge presents a new picture of postwar American literature, arguing that biases against genre fiction have unfairly disadvantaged the legacies of authors like Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett. Each of these women navigated a male-dominated postwar publishing world without compromising their values. Their category-defying treatment of gender roles and genre classifications created suspense in their work that spoke to the tensions of the “Age of Anxiety.” Lawson engages with foundational voices in American literature, genre theory, and feminism to argue that, by merging the dominant mode of literary realism with fantastical or heightened elements, Brackett, Jackson, and Highsmith responded to the big questions of their era with startling and unnerving answers. By elevating genre play to a marker of literary skill, Lawson contends, we can secure these writers a more prominent place within the canon of midcentury American literature and open the door for the recovery of their similarly innovative peers.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215746
ISBN-10: 0814215742
Pagini: 210
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814215742
Pagini: 210
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“On Edge is exactly what scholarship should be. Lawson convincingly unpacks the biases of gender and genre at midcentury and proves that Jackson, Highsmith, and Brackett experimented with, and at times subversively transformed, popular genres. She reveals to readers the undercurrent of feminist concerns in genres more often remembered for the stifling of such concerns.” —Margaret Reid, author of Cultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century America
“Lawson compellingly reassesses the importance of ‘low’ literary forms such as woman-authored gothic, suspense, and science fiction, arguing for gender as its own meaningful genre and illustrating the ways that these authors answered serious intellectual questions—and leave a memorable literary legacy.” —Jacqueline Foertsch, author of Freedom’s Ring: Literatures of Liberation from Civil Rights to the Second Wave
Notă biografică
Ashley Lawson is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her research centers on twentieth-century American literature and women’s creativity. She has published essays on Zelda Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Shirley Jackson, Sara Haardt, and Estelle Faulkner. In addition to these specialties, her teaching interests include Iranian and Japanese women writers, femmes fatales, and the American gothic.
Extras
In June 1943, Patricia Highsmith tagged along with a friend on a social call to the Greenwich Village apartment of Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, Shirley Jackson. Highsmith’s interest was mostly in Hyman, whose employer, the New Yorker, had a frustrating habit of rejecting her story submissions, but the brief description of the event she recorded later in her diary focuses instead on her conversation with his wife. Highsmith, just twenty-two years old, was struggling to make ends meet by writing for comic book publishers, whereas the twenty-six-year-old Jackson had already placed several short stories in respected publications. And so while Highsmith found Hyman to be “horrible,” she grudgingly admitted that Jackson was “alright.” As the two drank coffee together, Highsmith reportedly told Jackson about her own work, and the more seasoned writer apparently gave the newbie much-appreciated advice about acquiring an agent.
This otherwise uneventful meeting warrants a mention in Joan Schenkar’s 2009 biography of Highsmith because, though these writers have rarely been directly compared to one another, upon further consideration the similarity between their work is strikingly obvious. Schenkar notes as a primary point of connection Jackson’s interest in “the same psychological states which obsessed Pat,” but the professional parallels between these women extend much further. Both explored a relatively cohesive sets of themes in a wide variety of literary forms ranging from children’s books to science fiction to mysteries. And despite their reputations as masters of suspense, both also had cantankerous and sometimes decidedly unfeminine personalities (at least by midcentury America’s standards) that added an underlying, often subversive sense of humor to their writing. Each produced a body of work that has been described both as outside of time and of its time, and their literary legacies were neglected until relatively recently when, with the rise of feminist criticism and queer studies, each experienced a renaissance. For scholars today, then, this encounter is more than just a trivial anecdote of literary history. The meeting of two great female creative minds so early in their respective careers suggests the tantalizing possibility of a very different narrative of postwar American literature, one that foregrounds the contributions of female writers and emphasizes a network of personal and professional connections between them. By studying these authors alongside Leigh Brackett, another midcentury, multi-genre writer whose legacy has been neglected, I hope to demonstrate the significant influence of women writers in the postwar era. In addition to highlighting gender influences, I will emphasize the way assumptions about genre—another important category of meaning—shaped critical perceptions of postwar publishing and its writers, thereby making the biases of this era visible.
Though there are a number of significant similarities between these authors’ literary interests, most important for this study is the fact that all three took a fluid and creative approach to genre writing. Jackson’s distinctive fusion of various formats was her greatest strength but also a liability within an industry that preferred clear, simple (or simplistic) marketing narratives. Conversely, Highsmith was snared in just one of those categories—that of crime or suspense writer—and was never able to escape the burdens of such a designation. Brackett was perhaps most disadvantaged by genre biases, as she was a master of the pulpiest forms of two marginally respected genres: crime and science fiction. Yet all three writers, in part because of these associations, have been assessed mostly in comparison to male genre writers. For example, Jackson’s gothic approach has been considered against that of predecessors like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw; Highsmith is frequently grouped with Jim Thompson as crime writers who defied the genre norms of their era and thus influenced many authors to come; and Leigh Brackett is compared to Black Mask crime writers, usually Raymond Chandler, or, for her science fiction, her husband Edmond Hamilton or her protégé Ray Bradbury. Consequently, grouping these women writers upends narratives of literary influence and highlights more subtle elements of their treatment of gender—especially for Highsmith and Brackett, who were writing primarily in masculinized genres.
This otherwise uneventful meeting warrants a mention in Joan Schenkar’s 2009 biography of Highsmith because, though these writers have rarely been directly compared to one another, upon further consideration the similarity between their work is strikingly obvious. Schenkar notes as a primary point of connection Jackson’s interest in “the same psychological states which obsessed Pat,” but the professional parallels between these women extend much further. Both explored a relatively cohesive sets of themes in a wide variety of literary forms ranging from children’s books to science fiction to mysteries. And despite their reputations as masters of suspense, both also had cantankerous and sometimes decidedly unfeminine personalities (at least by midcentury America’s standards) that added an underlying, often subversive sense of humor to their writing. Each produced a body of work that has been described both as outside of time and of its time, and their literary legacies were neglected until relatively recently when, with the rise of feminist criticism and queer studies, each experienced a renaissance. For scholars today, then, this encounter is more than just a trivial anecdote of literary history. The meeting of two great female creative minds so early in their respective careers suggests the tantalizing possibility of a very different narrative of postwar American literature, one that foregrounds the contributions of female writers and emphasizes a network of personal and professional connections between them. By studying these authors alongside Leigh Brackett, another midcentury, multi-genre writer whose legacy has been neglected, I hope to demonstrate the significant influence of women writers in the postwar era. In addition to highlighting gender influences, I will emphasize the way assumptions about genre—another important category of meaning—shaped critical perceptions of postwar publishing and its writers, thereby making the biases of this era visible.
Though there are a number of significant similarities between these authors’ literary interests, most important for this study is the fact that all three took a fluid and creative approach to genre writing. Jackson’s distinctive fusion of various formats was her greatest strength but also a liability within an industry that preferred clear, simple (or simplistic) marketing narratives. Conversely, Highsmith was snared in just one of those categories—that of crime or suspense writer—and was never able to escape the burdens of such a designation. Brackett was perhaps most disadvantaged by genre biases, as she was a master of the pulpiest forms of two marginally respected genres: crime and science fiction. Yet all three writers, in part because of these associations, have been assessed mostly in comparison to male genre writers. For example, Jackson’s gothic approach has been considered against that of predecessors like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw; Highsmith is frequently grouped with Jim Thompson as crime writers who defied the genre norms of their era and thus influenced many authors to come; and Leigh Brackett is compared to Black Mask crime writers, usually Raymond Chandler, or, for her science fiction, her husband Edmond Hamilton or her protégé Ray Bradbury. Consequently, grouping these women writers upends narratives of literary influence and highlights more subtle elements of their treatment of gender—especially for Highsmith and Brackett, who were writing primarily in masculinized genres.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 Gender and Genre: Breaking Boundaries Chapter 2 Brackett’s Genre-Perfect/Genre-Bending Crime Fiction Chapter 3 Conflicted Perspectives in Jackson’s and Highsmith’s Crime Fiction Chapter 4 The Alien among Us: Expanding Reality in Speculative Fiction Chapter 5 Gothic Subjectivity in Jackson and Highsmith Chapter 6 Dystopian Visions of Community in Pre- and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction Chapter 7 Housebound: Domestic Realism and Women’s Magazines Afterword Works Cited Index
Descriere
Reframes postwar American literary fiction through the work of Leigh Brackett, Shirley Jackson, and Patricia Highsmith, arguing that recognizing genre play as literary skill is essential for a more inclusive canon.