Southern Gothic Literature

by Jay Ellis (editor)

American Southern Gothic Literature presents one of the few book-length surveys of the genre available today, in a diverse collection of representative texts from a group of international critics. In addition to exemplary novels from established writers, such as Edora Welty, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, and Cormac McCarthy, works explored here include poetry, a play, and a fairy tale novella. this volume, part of the Critical Insights series, offers a collection of original essays that will establish for students and their teachers an exemplary representation of the genre Southern Gothic as a field of study within American literature.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Stephanie Graves]

This is a truly excellent book, and not merely because the field is so fallow. A critical collection on the Southern Gothic is hard to come by, so this certainly delivers in that regard, but apart from that, it is a truly marvelous essay collection that both defines the field and investigates what it means in the contemporary world. Spanning from the classics such as Faulkner, Welty, and McCullers to more modern fare such as the rise of the southern zombie and the swampy romanticism of Swamp Thing and True Blood, the collection investigates the genre both past and present, recontextualizing the modern implications of the southern gothic tradition as both a paean to the past and a dark legacy for the future.

[Jay]

I found this compilation of essays to be rather disappointing even though I tend to try to be sympathetic to scholarship. (Scholarship is hard, it’s a lot of work, you get paid next to nothing to do it, and it tends to receive backlash from mainstream readers as being inaccessible.) Unfortunately, the first two essays seemed so weak that I had to skim the rest of the book. The first essay by the editor insists that we “triangulate its [the Southern Gothic’s] spatial history” through zombie narratives, the geographical location of the South, and the generic positioning of the Southern Gothic. While his attempt to theorize this sort of new way of thinking about the Southern Gothic is interesting, it does little for those seeking an accurate representation of Southern Gothic literature (there are no zombies in traditional mid-20th Century Southern Gothic novels, and not all are centered on the institution of slavery, which short circuits the slave as zombie analogy). It is also a bit of a disservice to the other contributors to open the work with a rather radical claim. The second essay seems to open under the assumption that what makes a work “Southern Gothic” is that its author just needs to have been born in the South. It then proceeds to outline how various Gothic tropes (Gothic villains, victims, settings, etc) are applicable to and appropriated in Southern Gothic novels. This would be interesting and even worthwhile if the essay hadn’t opened with the acknowledgement that the moniker was given by Ellen Glasgow without addressing why Glasgow bestowed these works with the moniker in the first place. (A point that may seem trivial on my part to point out, but I think it’s important to consider when charting the history and development of the “genre.”)

The fact is that there have been so few works examining and charting the Southern Gothic that this could have been an excellent overview for scholars and bibliophiles alike. If you’re looking for a more reliable introduction to the Southern Gothic, I would steer you toward Palgrave MacMillan’s Handbook to the Southern Gothic, which came out just a few years after this work.