Southern Fiction

Question 1

Southern Fiction
Influences (2)
Characteristics (7)
Style

Answer 1

Influence: William Faulkner literature + portrayal of the South

Characteristics:
- Disposition toward “gothic” and gotesque themes and style.
- Faulkner’s fascination with violence, absurdity, and psychological horror.
- Concerned with the problem of intractable human evil.
- Interested in decadence.
- Dark picture of humanity.
- Settings: often small communities in rural Southern areas.
- Marginal + morally, emotionally twisted protagonists.
- Broken communication and failed love prevail.

Style : often evince formal and literary sophistication.

Question 2

Southern Fiction
Southern grotesque/gothic
- Characteristics (4)

Answer 2

• Literature that mixes terror and horror to shock and disturb.
• Comic/obscene exaggeration with sometime gratuitous violence (physical deformity/sexual deviance)
• Begins with E.A. Poe
• Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams
• Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor

Question 3

Southern Fiction
Flannery O’Connor
- Characteristics (4)
- Work (4)

Answer 3

• South defined as “Christ-haunted landscape”
• “Christian Realism”
• “Divine mercy” as a generous irony.
• Gothic + grotesque + humour

“A Good Man is Hard To Find”

• Horrors of a world without morality or reason displaced onto grotesque female bodies.
  “Good Country People”
  “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”
  “Revelation”

Question 4

Southern Fiction
Eudora Welty
- Characteristics (4)
- Work (4)

Answer 4

• Most novels and stories situated in and around the South.
• Profusion of metaphor and difficult surface of narrative.
• Sharp sense of humour.
• Language and style demands readers to be vigilant and pay close attention.

“Why I Live at the P.O.” (comedy)
“A still moment” (lyric)
“Death of a salesman” (tragedy)
“Petrified man” (gothic/grotesque)

Question 5

Southern Fiction
Tennessee Williams
Characteristics (6)
Work (2)

Answer 5

• Influenced by Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane.
• Rejected theatrical conventions of realism (“The Glass Menagerie”)
• Vivid, colloquial southern speech.
• “Poetic realism”
• Characters believe their world was meant to be better.
  - concerned with nameless fears and insecurities + desperate desires
• Poetic examinations of the injured spirit.

“A Streetcar Named Desire”

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”