The novelist Ellen Glasgow, speaking to a group of librarians at the University of Virginia in 1936, referred to a “new and disturbing” trend in southern US fiction, one she associated with writers such as Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner. She christened it “Southern Gothic”, a term that would become shorthand for a literature characterised by biblical rhythms and phonetic vernacular, tales of hermits and misfits, of homicide, suicide, fratricide, patricide, infanticide, incest, religious fundamentalism and familial dysfunction. The term has become synonymous with the stories of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams,...
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