The names readers generally think of when seeking out Southern Gothic fiction usually begin with Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Cormac McCarthy, or Tennessee Williams. Southern Gothic literature revealed the racial divide, oppression, loneliness, poverty and violence of the times. In the deep South, Gothic literature took on an uncanny and lively form of its own with odd, misunderstood characters that challenged the occidental and bucolic ideal that had taken root. If the poster child for early Gothic literature was the fashionable, lascivious and classically educated Lord Byron, then Southern Gothic writing was the distant and howling bastard child from the calcareous backlands of America. Widely popular and grotesque Gothic fiction reached the heart of America and gave birth to a new modern subgenre: Southern Gothic. That same tradition was repurposed to the United States by 19th-century writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Their work is the beginning of a genre that gives rise to Southern Gothic Literature.Īngria developed its laws, communities and protagonists that were existent outside of English society, which is exactly what Gothic writing accomplished while revealing the most earthly and taboo desires of the British. As children, the Brontë sisters created and penned the wildly vivid and intensely detailed fantasy world of Angria to leave Haworth, and ironically, their dreams about escape existed in an intermediary realm between the supernatural and reality that is a good analogy for Gothic literature as a whole. This once tumbling, sprawling place– a place in Yorkshire I have never been to– will always conjure up the idea of Gothic literature and the hazy grey vale I imagine the Brontë sisters were confronted with in Haworth when they wrote such seminal pieces as Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. How Southern Gothic Literature Came to Be
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