Slavery, Degeneracy, Myth, and Historical Resonances: A Survey of Southern Gothic Screen Texts.

Abstract

This chapter establishes “Southern Gothic” as an umbrella term for films and television series that conform to certain tendencies in narrative, thematic, aesthetic, and formal realms. It undertakes a survey of Southern Gothic screen texts that occupy an organized if tumultuous generic space, which, for the purposes of thoroughness and clarity, will be examined in a way that emphasizes certain clusters or affiliations. These clusters or affiliations are in no way intended to be understood as definitive or particularly stable, but rather, they help to navigate a network of titles that participate, to varying degrees, in the Southern Gothic genre. To this end, texts are organized into four categories: “adapting the literary Southern Gothic” “the degenerate South,” “resonances of slavery and civil war,” and “the mythic South.”