![]() ![]() ![]() Meanwhile, in The Deception of Harriet Fleet, Helen Scarlett (Quercus) adds feminist riffs to a Victorian narrative, Karen Coles' The Asylum (Wellbeck) draws on family history to explore mental health mistreatment, and Edwardian West Yorkshire provides a tantalisingly lonely setting for Mrs England (Manilla Press), Stacey Halls's account of control and deception. Want a horror hybrid? Catriona Ward's twisty The Last House on Needless Street (Viper) features a missing child and a woman out for revenge. The past oozes into the present in AJ Elwood's The Cottingley Cuckoo (Titan), based around the famous Cottingley fairy photograph hoax, while Lizzie Fry's The Coven (Sphere) imagines a world in which witchcraft is real, and a demagogue US president is out to hunt down its practitioners.įeeling pre-apocalyptic? Sue Rainsford describes the lives of twins holed up on an abandoned commune in Redder Days (Doubleday). In coming months, fans can visit a castle-turned-girls' boarding school that harbours tenebrous secrets in Phoebe Wynne's Madam (Quercus), reimagine the life of Pride and Prejudice's Miss Anne de Bourgh in Molly Greeley's The Heiress (Hodder & Stoughton), and learn about the true story of an engineer and a medium in Big Brother finalist AJ West's debut, The Spirit Engineer (Duckworth). Fear of a past that can't be exorcised? Sounds a lot like "long Covid". Claustrophobia? Try successive lockdowns spent working, learning, and socialising from home. The world seems to have grown only more uncertain in the years since, and it's certainly tough to rival the age of Covid for gothic motifs made manifest. If the 1970s (think the oil crisis, Watergate, a spike in "skyjackings") primed readers to be receptive to such elements, it was a decade destined to be far outdone by the start of the 21st Century in terms of horror and upheaval (9/11, the global financial crisis, an intensified fear of climate apocalypse). ![]() The Gothic has always been about far more than heroines in Victorian nightgowns, trapped in labyrinthine ancestral homes, and along with the supernatural, its imaginings probe power dynamics and boundaries, delving deep into disorder and duality. It's a theme Carlos Ruiz Zafón took up several decades later: "Ours is a time with a dark heart, ripe for the noir, the gothic and the baroque", he wrote in 2010. Even though these guys and gals came from and wrote about a defeated region, they ultimately found triumph on the literary scene."We live in Gothic times," declared Angela Carter back in 1974. Some of the greatest American writers of all time-big shots like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor-are associated with Southern Gothic. Though it had its roots in the 19th century, in the Gothic genre and in the works of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, the Southern Gothic movement developed in the early 20th century and reached its peak toward the middle of the century. So is it any wonder that we'll find lots of grotesqueness and violence in Southern Gothic literature? And the institution of slavery, which was the bedrock of Southern society for hundreds of years before the war, was even more grotesque. The war itself, of course, was a pretty grotesque experience. ![]() Southern Gothic, the literature that developed as a result of this questioning, raises issues like: Why is violence such a huge part of Southern culture? How did the South's history of slavery and racial oppression warp Southern society? Why did the South have such a hard time picking itself up after its defeat in the war? The Civil War forced Southern writers-many of whom were born in the aftermath of the war-to really think about what it meant to be Southern. The Civil War, which brought an end to slavery in the South, left behind it a society that was devastated, economically and socially, by defeat. This lit is not for the squeamish.īut Southern Gothic literature is full of doom and gloom for a reason: it totally developed in the wake of the Civil War (1861-1865). That's right: we're talking about Southern Gothic literature, where we'll find a healthy dose of the grotesque, a hefty dash of violence, and as much disintegration and decay as the gothiest goth could want. Southern-gothic-kafka-and-moby-dick-moby-dick-what-is-southern-gothic. ![]()
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