322 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Literary Criticism | Literary Criticism / American
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.
Eric Gary Anderson is associate professor of English at George Mason University and the author of American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions.
Taylor Hagood, professor of American literature at Florida Atlantic University, is the author of Faulkner’s Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth and Faulkner, Writer of Disability.
Daniel Cross Turner is the author of Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South and the coeditor of Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry. He is Head of Programming and Outreach for the Georgetown County Library System.
“A strong selection of essays. . . . This collection is well worth the time of those interested in a close examination of the origins of Southern gothic literature.”—Publishers Weekly
“Being self-aware and meta without being campy or politically irrelevant is very hard to pull off, but the editors of this volume do it—and even make it look easy.”—American Literary History
The Facebook page for Undead Souths has risen up!
Watch editor Dan Turner on WPDE discussing the role of the undead in southern storytelling.
Editor Eric Gary Anderson talks about how his love of horror contributed to the creation of Undead Souths.
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