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Florida Gothic: Shadows in the Sunshine State

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The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic

Abstract

Hogue argues that Florida authors employ the Gothic mode to examine the long history of trauma and loss shadowing the state’s sunny public image. She examines Francis Parkman’s Pioneers of France in the New World, Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘To the Fountain of Youth,’ Peter Matthiessen’s Killing Mister Watson, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, exploring how these works patrol the borders between civilization and savagery, known and unknown, and life and death, finding in Florida monstrous Others mirroring darkness thrown into sharp relief by the bright Florida sun.

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Bibliography

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Further Reading

  • Glassman, S., & O’Sullivan, M. (Eds.). (1997). Florida Noir: Crime fiction and film in the Sunshine State. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

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  • Matthiessen, P. (1999). Bone by bone. New York: Random House.

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  • Matthiessen, P. (1998). Lost Man’s river. New York: Vintage.

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  • O’Sullivan, M., & Lane, J. C. (Eds.). (1991). The Florida reader: Visions of paradise from 1530 to the present. Sarasota: Pineapple Press.

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  • VanderMeer, J. (2014). Acceptance. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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  • VanderMeer, J. (2014). Authority. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marietta College, Marietta, OH, USA

    Bev Hogue

Authors
  1. Bev Hogue
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor Emerita Department of English Language and Literature, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

    Susan Castillo Street

  2. Professor Emeritus of English, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA

    Charles L. Crow

Copyright information

© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)

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Hogue, B. (2016). Florida Gothic: Shadows in the Sunshine State. In: Castillo Street, S., Crow, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_12

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