Description
Book SynopsisThe Southern Gothic on Screen explores a body of screen texts that conform to certain generic conventions and aesthetics that, since the early twentieth century, have led to the construction of the American South as a space of ruin, decay, melancholy, loss, and haunting. The book considers the cultural significance of the Southern Gothic on screen by examining southern otherness as the primary mechanism through which the South is rendered a space of darkness and danger. This opens up a critical space for the Southern Gothic to be discussed as a screen genre with its own complex visual, thematic and narrative codes. The book establishes a perspective that synthesizes a broad understanding of Southern Gothic genericity with pre-existing cultural and political discourses on the South, resulting in an analysis that is specific to film and television while remaining heedful of the intersecting discourses that inform both the Gothic and the South as historic and mediated constructs.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
From Belles to Bayous: The Fall of the South on Screen
Section One The South in the Cultural Imaginary
1. The South as Region: Southern History, Southern Identity, and Perceptions of Southern Difference
2. From Sectionalism to Swamp People: Conceptualizations of Southern Otherness
3. Ghosts Fierce and Instructive: The South as Haunted Terrain
Section Two Gothic Visions, Southern Stories
4. Crumbling Structures and Contaminated Narratives: Genre and the Gothic
5. Manifesting the Other
Section Three The Southern Gothic on Screen
6. Locating the Gothic South
7. Slavery, Degeneracy, Myth, and Historical Resonances: A Survey of Southern Gothic Screen Texts
Section Four Case Studies:
Toys in the Attic and
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus 8. Reinterpreting Gothic Secrecy:
Toys in the Attic 9. Finding the South in the Ethereal: Atmosphere and the Spectral in
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus Conclusion – Fading, But Never Faded
Bibliography
Filmography
Television Series
Songs
Video Games
Websites
Index
