The Great Depression in Twenty-first Century Southern Gothic Novels: Joe Lansdale’s The Bottoms, Ron Rash’s Serena, and Julia Franks’ Over the Plain Houses

Abstract

As a literary genre, Southern Gothic focuses on the major social, economic, racial and gender role issues of the South in the twentieth century and the horrifying acts of violent and perverted characters. Southern Gothic works written in the twenty-first century, however, present the problems of the contemporary South such as the issues of the working-class, environmental exploitation and gender-based discrimination by making use of and subverting the conventional Southern Gothic tropes, thus blending contemporary issues with the conventional characteristics of the genre. One of the most distinctive qualities of the contemporary Southern Gothic works is the way they represent poverty and the poverty-stricken Southerners. Conventional Southern Gothic works often demonize poverty and depict the poor as uneducated and dim-witted monsters, whereas many authors of contemporary Southern Gothic adapt a more genuine and sympathetic stance towards poverty and impoverished people as they themselves belong to the working-class and/or experienced financial hardships. In this thesis, three works by three Southern authors, The Bottoms (2000) by Joe Lansdale, Serena (2007) by Ron Rash, and Over the Plain Houses (2016) by Julia Franks are discussed as contemporary Southern Gothic novels and are analyzed by comparing and contrasting them with the established conventions of the genre. The common ground on which these three novels meet is returning to the timeframe of the Great Depression to underscore the issue of poverty and thus, unlike the canonical Southern Gothic works in which the Great Depression does not occupy a significant place, to reclaim the experiences and the stories of the poor Southerners who were misrepresented or not represented at all.