Abstract
Surveying the development of the Southern Gothic landscape, Sivils locates its origins in seventeenth-century captivity narratives by figures such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Captain John Smith. He then traces the cultural evolution of the Southern Gothic landscape through a selection of texts by Henry Clay Lewis, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and others. Referencing critics such as María del Pilar Blanco and Yi-Fu Tuan—and placing emphasis upon the portrayal of the swamp as related to issues of racial oppression—Sivils ultimately argues that these landscapes function as much more than just passive settings. They are, rather, dynamic sites of haunting that reflect, and at times participate in, the South’s legacy of human and environmental abuse.
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Further Reading
Yaeger, P. (2002). Dirt and desire: Reconstructing southern women’s writing, 1930–1990. University of Chicago Press. Yaeger focuses on a narrow selection of Southern texts, but her observations, especially those about the role of trauma and the grotesque in the South’s racial politics, are applicable well beyond the book’s stated boundaries. Also illuminating is Yaeger’s recognition of how the landscape (and even the dirt itself) functions as a troubled contact zone between the races.
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Sivils, M.W. (2016). Gothic Landscapes of the South. 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_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_7
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