“Where Are We?": New Directions and Global Turns in the American Southern Gothic of the 21st Century
This thesis, “‘Where Are We?’: New Directions and Global Turns in the American Southern Gothic of the 21st Century,” charts new directions and global currents in American Southern discourse and regional studies, specifically by examining the modern Southern gothic mode. Modern imperialist practices of globalization and late capitalism/neoliberalism continue to uproot and unsettle traditional notions of American place and space, reconfiguring our preconceived understanding of regional identities and traditions. I first examine these novel iterations of “placeless” regionalism in regional gothic texts as a response to this turn toward the “Global South,” including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. I then engage with emergent trends in Southern gothic media, such as the popularity of undeadness as a motif and televisual narratives rooted in regional space, in order to speculate on the future of the South as genre and national identity.
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