This study will discuss each of Shirley Jackson's six novels. The discussions will concentrate on plot, setting, theme, characterization, and style.

Denna uppsats har som syfte att undersöka skräckens roll i sympatiskapande, hur denkan användas för att skapa sympati för karaktärer. För att utföra undersökningenanalyseras två karaktärer från skräckserien The Haunting of Hill House (2018), medhjälp av Jens Eders karaktärsklocka som analysmetod. Analysen visar att skräckentillför mycket till vad som gör karaktärerna sympatiska, genom att gestaltakaraktärernas känslor och problem på ett tydligt sätt. Det går att se skräckens möjligaroll som verktyg för att effektivt skapa sympati, till exempel i möjligheten att skapaen vilja hos karaktärerna som publiken kan sympatisera med.

In this dissertation, disability theories frame readings of madness in select works by Shirley Jackson, Sylvia Plath, and Toni Cade Bambara. The dissertation explores the relationship between madness and fiction, with the author demonstrating the productive and generative aspects of madness. Close readings of the literary works emphasize the impact of madness on structural and formal elements including narrative perspective, sustained metaphors, and narrative time. In chapter one, I use the disability theory concepts of narrative prosthesis and aesthetic nervousness to read Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. In chapter 2, I analyze Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle to explore the concept of unreliable narration, observing similarities between the social model of disability and reader-centric theories of unreliable narration. In chapter 3, I explore unhealthy disability and medical treatment in the sustained metaphors of light and darkness in Plath's hospital stories, "Tongues of Stone," "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams," and "The Daughters of Blossom Street." In chapter 4, I use disability history to read narratives of medical institutionalization in Plath's novel The Bell Jar. In chapter 5, I use Bambara's concept of "other kinds of intelligences" to develop a Black feminist methodology for reading mad intelligences in Bambara's novel The Salt Eaters. In the dissertation's conclusion, I note prejudice against madpersons in recent legal policies promoting involuntary psychiatric institutionalization, using Bambara's short story "The Hammer Man" to demonstrate the violence of such policies.