These are words that get thrown around somewhat regularly, especially when you're getting an English degree. The problem is that neither of them get explained in any useful ways.
SO, what better place to ask than a giant website of writers?
Explain the difference, and the conventions that go into each.
gothic literature= horror + romance
southern gothic= crazy shit happening in the South
Gothic / goth is one of the most variegated terms around. It means something different in practically every context (History, Architecture, Music, Literature, Fashion) some of which are related, some of which are not.
I've never even heard of Southern Gothic. Sounds... awful.
"I've never even heard of Southern Gothic. Sounds... awful."
Really?
William Faulkner is considered Southern Gothic is that helps you, Michael.
I had no idea, but thanks for the clarification, avery. I've never been formally educated beyond high school and a few college computer science classes. One of the reasons I'm going back this fall after a 12-year hiatus.
According to wiki, so is Harper Lee. I knew Flannery O'Conner was, but my sweet Harper?
I would disagree on Harper Lee.
I love Southern Gothic, but perhaps I've misunderstood, because although I also love To Kill A Mockingbird, I wouldn't have thought it was Southern Gothic. I read this thread to get answers and now I am more confused.
So...Gothic literature also tends to focus on the upper echelon of society. But...does Southern Gothic always do that? Husband and I are disagreeing.
Yeah, me too. But the almighty wikipedia says it is so. I just checked to see if she had written other books besides To Kill a Mocking Bird, but it looks like she didn't.
Good examples of southern gothic: Harry Crews' Feast of Snakes and Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel.
Yeah, I remember learning that TKAM was her only novel. Either I have absolutely NO grasp on what Southern Gothic is, or the person who came up with that thinks it means "it happened in the South".
Her only book was To Kill a Mockingbird, and while it is Southern, it is not Gothic. I've decided.
Southern Gothic often deals with (MOST often I would say) the poorest of the poor.
Okay. So Avery agrees with ME! Take that Husband!
Give him a copy of As I Lay Dying and tell him to suck on it. We're right.
He's taking his defeat rather well.
My interpretation;
Both Gothic and Southern Gothic share a lot of traits- usually it focuses on clear cut class divides, the characters are somewhat grotesque or a step away from the norm of the setting. Like Bradley pointed out, Gothic is also steeped in Romance, not just in the usual 'boy meets girl' type of thing, but also the Romanticism period with it's focus of feelings.
Southern Gothic is simply an extension of that, as as the name implies, focuses on stories/writers of the U.S South who wrote about life there and either didn't shy from the every day horrors, or magnified it.
For me, the two titles that immediately spring to mind exemplifying each genre are Bronte's Wuthering Heights and O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to find.
Harper Lee is sometimes considered part of the Southen Gothic cannon because just like Faulkner and O'Connor, she wrote about the lives of people of the south, and like the other two writers I mentioned, her most famous work touches on racism, class divides, etc. I think it's just that writer's like O'Connor have so strongly defined Southern Gothic with her style, that it seems jarring to put Lee in there.
Well, To Kill a Mockingbird is about racism and violence. Although I don't know if it has actual violence rather than concerning a rape that didn't actually happen. Haven't read it since high school.
Southern Gothic is supposed to be a subgenre of Gothic, but I don't know considering not all Southern Gothic consists of horror and romance.
I've read it in more recent years...there is actual violence (and perhaps a rape? That I cannot remember for sure), just not by the person being tried. And there is definite racism and classism. I *suppose* by hard definition, it fits.
Bradley--I think that more recent Southern Gothic is getting back to horror and romance.
And...Southern Gothic sometimes focuses on the human element of horror. I think that may qualify.
Maybe parts of it fit. I can grant that.
But I feel like that is too generalized of a definition. I could then argue John Grisham is a Southern Gothic writer by those standards.
I was thinking that about horror. Perhaps I should have only written that it doesn't always have romance.
By that definition my Beyond Thunderdome story was...Southern California Gothic.
I've heard Donald Ray Pollock's "The Devil All the Time" described as Southern Gothic. And "Appalachian Noir" I don't even know what that is. Man, I'm beginning to hate genres.
I assume a noir that occurs in appalachia.
Appalachia is definitely it's own little place, very different from the areas that surround it, so I can see why some might define a story as "Appalachian Noir" rather than just "noir".
But I will agree that genres frustrate me. If we can't all agree on what genre a classic like TKAM was, how are people like me suppose to "choose" what genre we are when asked? I'm really thinking of calling my writing Southern California Gothic. But then what of my stories that take place in Maryland? Ahhhhhh!
I write post-Southern Gothic.
I think it's time for literature genres to revert.
Tragedy
Comedy
Wouldn't it be Southern Post-Gothic? Since the South is...you know...still the South?
I would never say that Harper wrote Southern Gothic. I'd say her genre is "Perfect" or maybe "Best book ever". Her and Amy Hempel are the only people writing in that genre.
^^Howie nails it.
We should all just start making up our own genres. Bands do it all the time, why not us?
I'm going to write Post-Literary-Luddite-Gothic-Western-Romances
And while we're on the subject of Harper Lee: How to Kill a Mockingbird
I used to write speculative philo-religious horror, or probably just "science fiction/horror" in any bookstore. I don't know what I write now. Transgressive, I guess. But while many of your average folks haven't heard of that as a literary term, it's become really boring to me. It needs a new coat of paint.
So I'm going to call it... dark urban psycho-speculative misanthropy. Which is actually maybe a little more creepily accurate than I intended. At least for the novel I'm writing.
I'm going to write Post-Literary-Luddite-Gothic-Western-Romances
I'd read that.
That bit about the "upper echelon" is probably important to distinguish the origin of the term. Faulkner and O'Connor both wrote about decay, the dust settling after the impact of the South's fall from grace, post-Civil War: a time when once-wealthy families were reduced to poverty, carpetbaggers helped the trend along, the poor continued to perpetuate their defeated belief system through oral tradition, the anglophilic aristocratic cavalier-types were becoming increasingly outdated, etc.
Since then, there actually is stuff which could be accurately described as "crazy shit happening in the South" and the label Gothic gets tacked on out of critical inertia / misunderstanding (I think.)
I haven't read TKAM (saw a theatre version though) but nothing I've heard about it makes it sound Gothic any more than The Ugly Duckling.
It has Southern Gothic elements, but I don't think it should be considered Southern Gothic as a whole.
yeah, i've heard DRP and Frank Bill called southern gothic. also Ron Rash. i want to say Cormac but he leans more to the west, but the vibe is there. and much of the west can also be in the south (on the mexican border). JCO may fit in here, her story "Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been" has that flavor.
Southern Gothic, these days, has become what could be better described as Rural Gothic, and includes a variety of writers, including Cormac McCarthy. Location has no bearing on it. Most of my writing could probably be called Southern Gothic, and I'm not from the South, either. Any poor, rural area is capable of producing Southern Gothic, at least sharing traits with it.
I think the name itself is at issue. The southern gothic authors wrote about grotesque subjects, people who are somehow damaged by circumstance or belief. As a result of that damage, they become pitiful creatures, monsters in some manner.
You have to remember what else was going on in literature around the same time. If Faulkner is sort of the father of Southern Gothic, writing around the 1930's and 1940's, you were also seeing a surge in the popularity of horror, including the writing of H.P. Lovecraft and various Victorian Gothic-era writers like Poe and Blackwood (shoutout to two of my favorites).
People saw similarities between the grotesque subject matter of those writers and the style of Faulkner and probably tacked the name Southern Gothic to his writing. I really think the name was largely a matter of timing. If Gothic horror had not been so popular at the time, it might have ended up with a different label.
This is entirely my own opinion based on timing of various stuff I found on Wikipedia, along with my impression of things I've read, so I could be dead wrong.
In reality, most of us here are probably influenced by Gothic writers. I've seen several horror writers around here. A lot of people came from Palahniuk's site, and you could call him a contemporarry gothic writer if you want to use that common thread of the grotesque.
^ Most of that seems reasonable.
Well, that all does seem reasonable. I think the thing to remember is that there are very few 'pure' books. Southern gothic books are influenced by Appalachian Noir. Southern sci-fi authors are influenced by both who in turn influence authors who never/seldom read A.N. or S.G, who in turn influence fantasy authors and so on.
Post-post-southern-noir-gothic-scifi-erotica.
Isn't post post neo?
neo-noir is the new black.
Isn't post post neo?
Ah, fuck genres.
I think JCO is considered contemporary Gothic lit, yeah. Patrick McGrath is another writer who I can think of as fitting neatly into the Gothic style, and maybe what I've read of Poppy Z Brite could be too. From what I've read of the old Gothic stuff what it's given to modern genres is a big mess of character archetypes (there's the anti-hero, the femme fatale and the whole mad monk types right?) then more pervasive is the Psychological Terror pretty much as a genre itself and the concept of the Beautiful Grotesque.
Linking Gothic to Southern Gothic, I had some idea once that I mostly forget now that had to do with the romanticism of the genres, that the rural South was this last bastion of old weary religious ideology opposed to those New York writers with their scientific advancement and enlightened views. Take that Flannery O'Connor story about the racist Grandma on the bus and how her religious upbringing is anachronistic and horrible now in the civil rights era and it's all a very nice and thoughtful little story. Something like that.
If you abbreviate and condense Southern Gothic to SoGoth, you are in Lovecraft territory.
If you abbreviate and condense Lovecraft territory to LoTory, YOU HAVE CRACKED THE CODE! HAVE A MILLION DOLLARS and feed your kids better gruel! Pet your dog like a lord and not like the peasant you were born.
YOU HAVE CRACKED THE CODE! HAVE A MILLION DOLLARS and feed your kids better gruel! Pet your dog like a lord and not like the peasant you were born.
AAHHH SHIT!
I've written a book!
What genre is it?
Oh Christ. Fuck. Well, bad things happen to good people, but they're located in the northern US. Also people break against the traditions of modern norms and expectations, but I use rather long sentences and more words than generally needed, but I like the flow of the narrative. There are themes of regret and a future that slips further away as you try to relive your own past. The characters are middle class and average. At least one of them has a real issue with authority, and two of them make dry sarcastic comments.
And you are a woman?
Me? Why, yes I am. You can tell because I have a vagina.
And your main character...is also a woman...
Yes.
CHICK LIT!
Are you certain, because I don't think...
Well, how old is the main character?
She's thirty-five. You can tell by cutting her open and counting the rings.
Ah, then I misspoke. WOMEN'S FICTION!
this is the most confusing thread. doesn't genre only matter in class when people are telling you what they think an author meant, or when trying to shelve books in a bookstore?
this is the most confusing thread. doesn't genre only matter
in class when people are telling you what they think an author meant, orwhen trying to shelve books in a bookstore?
Fixed.
Themes are not dependent on genre. There are certainly genres that dominate certain themes, (man's inevitable downfall when struggling against his own nature is much more common in horror than YA, but it also happens in sci-fi and others) it's just not exclusionary.
Genre's are really only marketing distinctions, not to say they are unimportant... or should never be considered when writing. But all the same, they're labels for making marketing decisions.
And this show makes me laugh:
