Since the Gothic first arose as a handful of tales about virginal young women being chased through European castles by usurping noblemen, the genre has splintered off into many different forms, some of which bear very little resemblance to the earliest Gothic stories. One of the best-known off-shoots of this mode of writing is the Southern Gothic. I touched on this topic briefly in my post on the American Gothic Tradition, but now I want to cover it in more depth. Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic literature that is defined both geographically and thematically. Generally set within the southern United States, works of Southern Gothic employ the macabre and the grotesque to expose the myth of the idyllic antebellum South. Common themes include the decay and corruption that exist behind beautiful facades (both physically and metaphorically), the decline of a dispossessed aristocracy, and the scars left by slavery and a long history of racial tensions. If you’ve ever taken an American literature class, it’s likely that you’ve already encountered some Southern Gothic. Below are a few authors best known for writing in this genre: Continue reading Intro to Southern Gothic
Tag: William Faulkner
Literature’s Strangest Chapters on Death
Death is a strange chapter in everyone’s story. Yet as we read through action-packed novels like the Game of Thrones series where a character dies almost every chapter, literary deaths may start to seem commonplace and we give little thought to how they are presented. For gothic authors, however, a character’s death is an opportunity to explore that fascinating, unknowable state and our relationship with it. What does it mean to be dead? How will this death impact the story? And how should we feel about it? Sometimes the only way to answer these questions is by employing some truly unique literary techniques. Below are three of my favorite unusual depictions of death in literature: Continue reading Literature’s Strangest Chapters on Death