Call for Proposals for Vol. 4, Issue 1–Jackson & Animality [deadline extended: Feb. 1, 2026]

Jonas, Merricat’s feline companion in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is possibly the most recognizable animal in Jackson’s oeuvre, casting his spells on various covers of the novel. He has been variously interpreted as a domestic animal, the adored pet of one of modern literature’s most iconic “crazy cat ladies”; a familiar, connecting Merricat and her sister Constance to a long history of both fictional and historical witches; and a non-human agent, whose complex bond with Merricat troubles the boundaries between culture and nature, human and animal, self and Other.  Cats also appear as conspicuous actors in stories such as “The Man in the Woods”, “My Uncle in the Garden” and in many of Jackson’s domestic tales. She herself kept many cats, including one named Shax, in honour of a demon described in the seventeenth-century grimoire, The Lesser Key of Solomon. Elsewhere, other animals, perhaps most notably the dog featured in her short story “The Renegade”, have severed a powerful symbolic function. We seek submissions that examine the role, symbolism, and presence of animals (of all kinds) in the literature of Shirley Jackson. While much attention has been given to Jackson’s uncanny, domestic, and psychological horror, comparatively little has focused on the non‐human beings that populate her world—pets, pests, wild animals, spectral animals, animal imagery—and how they contribute to her themes of otherness, fear, the pastoral/domestic, power, and human anxiety.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Animal metaphors and imagery in Jackson’s short stories and novels
• Posthumanist, post-structuralist, or queer ecological perspectives on Jackson’s treatment of animals (i.e., submissions that draw on theories by Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, etc.,) 
• Pets / domestic animals and their symbolic, psychological, or social roles
• Historical and literary accounts of witches’ familiars
• Wild animals, pests, vermin: fear, disgust, horror, thresholds between civilized/domestic (human) and wild (animal)
• Animality, as in what makes something “human” vs. “animal” in Jackson’s works, especially boundaries/border crossings
• Animal/human transformation, anthropomorphism, or the uncanny in relation to animals
• How animal presence contributes to atmosphere, Gothic horror, or the uncanny in Jackson
• Ethical or ecological readings: nature vs. culture in Jackson, environmental anxieties, animal rights etc.
• Comparative approaches: Jackson vs. other writers who use animals in horror/domestic fiction
• Adaptations that include or reinterpret animals in Jackson’s work (film, TV, stage etc.)

Please send abstracts & contact information via this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSedLLYPLHFeypbU8u39BctGhCXxWWIV... is February 1, 2026.

https://shirleyjacksonstudies.org/?page_id=35