Abstract
The landscapes and cityscapes of the sub-tropical Southern United States, with their opulent nature, exuberant cities, boisterous cultural diversity and troubled history of conflict and violence have long offered an alluring locale for Gothic narratives. This article explores the ways in which The Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–2013) – the best-selling literary series by Charlaine Harris and the basis for the HBO TV series True Blood – construct the Gothicised imageries of the American South as the terrain of confusing ambivalences; of glamour and exoticism, death and the uncanny. Informed by the discourses of tropicality, Tropical and Urban Gothic and exotic tourism – and the ways they interweave with the concept of Otherness – the paper seeks to illuminate the process of interrelating and consequently exoticising the figure of the Other and Southern sub-tropical land- and cityscapes. It also examines the tropes of urban interspecies relations articulated in the series as a metaphor for the Southern racial/ethnic heritage with its anxieties of miscegenation, transgression and “excessive” heterogeneity. A particular emphasis is placed on the accounts of New Orleans as the liminal space of cultural blending and touristic exploration of the figure of the Other.
Highlights
The landscapes and cityscapes of the sub-tropical Southern United States, with their opulent nature, exuberant cities, boisterous cultural diversity and troubled history of conflict and violence have long offered an alluring locale for Gothic narratives
This study explores some of the ways in which The Southern Vampire Mysteries construct and convey the Gothicised imageries of the United States sub-tropical region and its dwellers
Through these analyses this paper seeks to uncover the ways in which The Southern Vampire Mysteries contribute to the cultural tradition of symbolically constructing the sub-tropical American South as a Gothicised terrain of confusing ambivalences – those of glamour and exoticism, death and the uncanny
Summary
The landscapes and cityscapes of the sub-tropical Southern United States, with their opulent nature, exuberant cities, boisterous cultural diversity and troubled history of conflict and violence have long offered an alluring locale for Gothic narratives. Many famed bloodsuckers have been living, or passing through, the (in)famous city, contributing to the cultural discourse of New Orleans as the terrain of the Gothic and supernatural, and becoming a powerful voice in its narrative construction (Bernardi, 2016).4 In the world of The Southern Vampire Mysteries, where the undead have come out of the coffin to eagerly colonise the urban spaces of business, politics and entertainment, the vampires’ fascination with New Orleans is credited directly to “the whole Anne Rice thing”
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