Southern Gothic

Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters sometimes suffering from physical deformities or insanity; decayed or derelict settings and grotesque situations;[1] and sinister events bred from poverty, alienation, crime, violence, forbidden sexuality, or hoodoo magic.

[2] Elements of a Gothic treatment of the South first appeared during the ante- and post-bellum 19th century in the grotesques of Henry Clay Lewis and in the sardonic representations of Mark Twain.

In 1935, Ellen Glasgow critiqued the writings of Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and the "Southern Gothic School", stating that their work was filled with "aimless violence" and "fantastic nightmares".

[4] Southern Gothic particularly focuses on the South's history of slavery, racism, fear of the outside world, violence, a "fixation with the grotesque, and a tension between realistic and supernatural elements".

[4] Southern Gothic literature set out to expose the myth of the old Antebellum South with its narrative of an idyllic past that covered over social, familial, and racial denials and suppressions.

Songs often examine poverty, criminal behavior, religious imagery, death, ghosts, family, lost love, alcohol, murder, the devil, and betrayal.

Southern Gothic fiction writers like Carson McCullers and Zora Neale Hurston adapted their own work for the stage in language-heavy productions of The Member of the Wedding and Spunk.

The Color Purple is an adaptation of the novel with music by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, Stephen Bray, and Marsha Norman which has been performed around the country constantly since its world premiere at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in 2004.