SOUTHERN GOTHICSOUTHERN GOTHIC

Southern Gothic

• Writers like William Faulkner, Truman Capote and Flannery O'Connor are placed in a category known as 'Southern Gothic'.

• These writers (and others like them) take the elements of gothic fiction (the disturbed characters, the dark mood, the bizarre and the terrifying, even the supernatural), but using a distinctly rural american setting.

• Whereas regular Gothic tends to use the bizarre and supernatural to address concepts such as the darkness within the human mind and soul, Southern Gothic tends to expand towards the bizarre and darker aspects of society.

William Faulkner

• Faulkner is perhaps the most influential of the Southern Gothic writers.

• He was the son of a civil war hero.

• Won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949.

Flashback

• Faulkner often used the flashback as a literary device.

• Flashback refers to the shuffling of events, going back and forth in time.

• In his stories past, present and future seem to meld.

• When, after, and during introduce time changes.

Yoknapatawpha

• The fictional Yoknapatawpha county, in Mississippi, is the seat of many of his stories.

• The often colorful characters of the county and the peculiar things that happen there.

Across the world

• Faulkner is often credited as an inspiration for one of the strongest literary movements today: Magical Realism.

• Magical Realism gains strength in the late 1970s -1980s in Latin America, particularly through the works of Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez (A Hundred Years of Solitude).

• His fictional Macondo town is often compared by scholars to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha.