This was a region that had been extremely wealthy and powerful for much of its history, thanks to slavery, but the South's defeat in the Civil War meant that this once super-powerful and super-wealthy region found itself, well, permanently down in the dumps. This partly has to do with the history of the South. Southern Gothic literature is full of irony. That would be like if a story about a tea party with stuffed animals ended with a high-speed car chase and dramatic rooftop shoot-out. That's when the plot of a story takes the characters (and us readers) somewhere totally unexpected-in fact, the opposite of where you'd expect things to end up. In literature, there's also what you could call an ironic turn of events. It's like saying, "That fedora is totally hot," when what you really mean is, "That fedora is totally fugs." First, there's what you could call an ironic use of language: that's when an author (or a character) says the opposite of what he or she means. Irony is a word that gets thrown around a lot (we're looking at you, Alanis), but what does it actually mean? Well, in literature, it can mean a couple of things. It deals with a whole range of themes, from society and class to family. Explore why it made such a splash here.įlannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a classic Southern Gothic short story. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is one of the most famous (and awesome) novels in the Southern Gothic tradition. Williams was a playwright, and though a lot of his work deals with familiar Southern Gothic themes-decay, for instance, is a big one in his work-he mostly wrote, well, plays. The most famous works of Southern Gothic literature are novels like William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as well as short stories like Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" or Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find."Īs always, there's totally an important exception: Tennessee Williams. For one thing, Southern Gothic is partly inspired by Gothic literature, and most Gothic literature was also written as prose fiction. Southern Gothic is most closely associated with prose fiction, as in novels and short stories.
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