![]() Addie’s purifying corpse even gets to present a chapter from her own posthumous point of view. Of his novels, perhaps the darkest is As I Lay Dying (1930), which presents a stream of consciousness story narrated by various members of the dysfunctional Bundren family as they transport their dead matriarch across Mississippi. Faulkner was born in Mississippi, and almost all of his stories take place within his invented Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. William Faulkner is perhaps the biggest name associated with the Southern Gothic, and you’re sure to find him on nearly every American literature curriculum. Both stories exhibit a disillusionment with any romantic notions of the Civil War, or war in general, by portraying protagonists whose naïveté contrasts sharply with the reality of violence and bloodshed. His eagerness to play soldier slowly transforms into horror and despair when confronted with the genuine brutality of war. Another of his stories is “Chickamauga” (1889), about a deaf-mute child who unexpectedly finds himself in the middle of a battlefield. One of his best-known stories is “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890), which centers on Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer who is about to be hanged for attempting to interfere with Union supply lines. He is notable for both his classic ghost stories and his fictionalized accounts of the Civil War. Born in Ohio, he served on the Union side of the Civil War before going on to become a writer and journalist. Below are a few authors best known for writing in this genre:Īmbrose Bierce was one of the earliest writers of Southern Gothic literature. If you’ve ever taken an American literature class, it’s likely that you’ve already encountered some Southern Gothic. 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. 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. Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic literature that is defined both geographically and thematically. I touched on this topic briefly in my post on the American Gothic Tradition, but now I want to cover it in more depth. ![]() One of the best-known off-shoots of this mode of writing is the Southern Gothic. 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. Spencer on Review of Sister, Maiden, Monster-Pandemic Horror.Spencer on Review of Hell Bent-A Descent to the Underworld.Kyla Ward on Flowers in Gothic Literature.Paula Cappa on Review of The Writing Retreat-Channeling Stories and Spirits. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |