Undead Souths

The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture

Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, Daniel Cross Turner

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780807161098
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Depictions of the undead in the American South are not limited to our modern versions, such as the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead. As Undead Souths reveals, physical emanations of southern undeadness are legion, but undeadness also appears in symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms, including the social death endured by enslaved people, the Cult of the Lost Cause that resurrected the fallen heroes of the Confederacy as secular saints, and mourning rites revived by Native Americans forcibly removed from the American Southeast.To capture the manifold forms of southern haunting and horror, Undead Souths explores a variety of media and historical periods, establishes cultural crossings between the South and other regions within and outside of the U.S., and employs diverse theoretical and critical approaches. The result is an engaging and inclusive collection that chronicles the enduring connection between southern culture and the refusal of the dead to stay dead.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Confederacies of Undead Imagination: Going South through Wastelands to Jonestown
• 2 The Fall of the House of Po’ Sandy: Poe, Chesnutt, and Southern Undeadness
• 3 What Remains Where: Civil War Poetry and Photography across 150 Years
• 4 Gray Ghosts: Remediating the Confederate Undead
• 5 Melville’s Zombies, North and South
• 6 Topographical Ghosts: The Archival Architecture of Old New Orleans
• 7. Faulkner’s Doom: The Undead Inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha
• 8. Faulkner’s Deathways: The Race and Space of Mourning
• 9. Of Flesh and Bones: Incarnations of the Silenced Past in William Faulkner’s and Erskine Caldwell’s Early Southern Gothic Short Stories
• 10. MonstrousPlantations:White Zombie and the Horrors of Whiteness
• 11. When Dead Men Talk: Emmett Till, Southern Pasts, and Present Demands
• 12. Second Life: Salvage Operations in Cormac McCarthy’s Undead South
• 13. Last Roads Taken: Robert Frost, Cormac McCarthy, and Dying Worlds
• 14. Undead Genres/Living Locales: Gothic Legacies in The True Meaning of Pictures and Winter’s Bone
• 15. Burying the (Un)Dead and Healing the Living: Choctaw Women’s Power in LeAnne Howe’s Novels
• 16. The Indigenous Uncanny: Spectral Genealogies in LeAnne Howe’s Fiction
• 17. Crossin’ the Log: Death, Regionality, and Race in Jeremy Love’s Bayou
• 18. “Life Refusing to End”: The Transformative Gothic in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
• 19. “More Dead Than Living”: Randall Kenan’s Monstrous Community
• 20. Going to Ground: The Undead in Contemporary Southern Popular Culture Media and Writing
• Making Darkness Visible: An Afterword and an Appreciation
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index