Post-Southern Geographies: Space and Literature in the Contemporary American South

From a geocritical standpoint, American gothic literature historically relies on the symbolical space of the wilderness: a labyrinthine parapsychological realm of darkness and irrationality, and a rhetorical inversion of pastoral motives. The traditional sense of place of the American South stems from society’s projected cultural values on the environment and from a strict separation of Garden and Wasteland. This separation was no longer held after agricultural capitalism swept the region in the 1920s and 1930s, changing the landscape forever and bringing about semiotic chaos in what was once an orderly landscape of Jeffersonian descent. With the advent of the post-southern era, as described by Martyn Bone, literature struggled to redefine pastoral and gothic chronotopes in a quest for new geographical grounds in which the fragmented collective identity of the region could be rooted. Through the analysis of contemporary southern works, this essay aims at re-defining pastoral and gothic spaces in post-southern America.