Other famous Southern Gothic writers include: Harper Lee, Harry Crews, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Michael McDowell and others. Her writing unapologetically forced the reader to confront their own morals, ethics and human behavior through her very real and often very flawed characters.
She wrote many terrifying stories that highlighted the humanity (or very upsetting lack thereof) in the world around her. She is a leading voice in the Southern Gothic literary tradition of the 20th century. Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O’ Connor, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and others relied on the region’s problems to create the strangeness and underline the Gothic elements of that context.īesides William Faulkner, another major Southern Gothic staple is Flannery O’ Connor. Generations of Southern Gothic writers after Faulkner continued to exploit the social, economic and cultural contradictions of the South. Due to his powerful writing, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949. Faulkner’s complex and modern language creates a deep strangeness in readers, who are lost in alienating their own characters. His fictional country of Yoknapatawpha was the scene of the bitter defeat of the South in the Civil War, where social, racial and economic ruptures were most extreme. He is the master of Southern Gothic, and undoubtedly the most famous of all Southern Gothic writers. While Edgar Allan Poe is the fundamental figure of Southern Gothic literature, William Faulkner (1897-1962) is undisputedly the greatest. Many of his best known poems and short stories, although not set in the south of the country, exhibit all Southern Gothic literature elements that would characterize the genre. Famous Southern Gothic WritersĮdgar Allan Poe was the first Southern Gothic writer to exploit the genre’s potential. that are often symbolic of a “time gone by”. Moreover, major settings in Southern Gothic novels are plantations, old decaying places, graveyards, etc. While they may include supernatural or Gothic elements, they mainly focus on damaged, even delusional, characters. In addition, Southern Gothic novels focus on grotesque themes.
Humor and horror come together in Southern Gothic novels to form particularly dark comic moments of social turmoil. You don’t always get such ironic and dark humor in other types of Gothic literature. One of the things I particularly like about Southern Gothic is the humor which is particularly ironic, dark, and sometimes, even macabre. Southern Gothic novels use following elements to explore and critique the social issues of the South. Moreover, in Southern Gothic novels, the terror is firmly rooted within the land, the home, the family, the blood…There are no monsters of myth, just the horrors and hardships of brutal reality. But in Southern Gothic novels, the grand and dilapidated setting of traditional Gothic literature is replaced by ramshackle plantations, isolated deserts, swamps, ghettos, and bayous all bearing the scars of the South’s suffering. Southern Gothic novels focus on macabre, sinister, supernatural, grotesque, decay and explore social and cultural problems of the time.Įarly American Gothic fiction followed in the footsteps of its European cousins, exploring castles and forests and spooky suburbia. It has influences of classical Gothic literature, but is centered on the social and racial tensions of the Southern United States, especially in the period after the Civil War, which divided the country between industrialized and rural south. Southern Gothic is a literary genre that emerged in the 19th century American South and is widely popular to this day. 41 Best Southern Gothic Novels You Must Read.
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