Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic is a subgenre of fiction, music, film, theatre and television heavily influenced by Gothic elements and set in the American South. Its fiction highlights violence and cruelty as features of Southern culture, often through characters whose place in the social order exposes them to such treatment, with common motifs including racism, gender and sexual difference, poverty and disability. Where Gothic literature depicted the intrusion of a barbaric past into the Enlightenment, Southern Gothic depicts the persistence of social trauma in the reconstructed South, and some theories suggest the genre arose in reaction to romantic portrayals shaped by Lost Cause myths and the ideology of American exceptionalism.