Resources for Readers of Patchwork Girl

Resources for readers of Shelley Jackson’s
Patchwork Girl, or A Modern Monster

Terry Harpold
Department of English
University of Florida

Texts by Shelley Jackson

“Ineradicable Stain” – Jackson’s WWW site. Essential reading and listening: selections from her print fiction and nonfiction, audio recordings of spoken word performances, interviews and links to WWW-based texts and installations.
“my body - a Wunderkammer” – a WWW-based autobiographical fiction, similar in many respects to portions of Patchwork Girl.
“Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl” – a conference presentation given at MIT in 1998, an important and often-cited theoretical statement re hypertext narrative and authorial practice.
The Old Woman and the Wave. New York: DK Publishing, Inc, 1998. Illustrated fiction for children.
Sophia, the Alchemist’s Dog. New York: Atheneum, 2002. Illustrated fiction for children.
The Melancholy of Anatomy. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Short stories.
Half Life: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Texts by others

Baum, L. Frank. The Patchwork Girl of Oz. [1913]. New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1990. “I Hate Dignity!”
Coover, Robert. “Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age.” Coover’s eulogy for the first wave. He describes Jackson’s text as “the true paradigmatic work of the era.”
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Postmodern Culture 10.2 (2000). Influential, widely-cited critical study of Patchwork Girl.
Joyce, Elizabeth. “Sutured Fragments: Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl in Piecework.” Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature. Eds. Jan Van Looy and Jan Baetens. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003. 39–52.
Joyce, Michael. “Nonce Upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction.” Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 131–49. Joyce’s lyrical appreciation of hypertextual rereading. Patchwork Girl figures prominently among his examples.
Punday, Daniel. “Involvement, Interruption, and Inevitability: Melancholy as an Aesthetic Principle in Game Narratives.” SubStance 33.3 (2004): 80–107.