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Subgenre of Gothic fiction

Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, country music, film, theatre, and television that are heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South. Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence.

Elements of a Gothic treatment of the South were first apparent during the ante and post bellum 19th century in the grotesques of Henry Clay Lewis and in the de idealized representations of Mark Twain. The genre was consolidated, however, in the 20th century, when dark romanticism, Southern humor, and the new literary naturalism merged in a new and powerful form of social critique. Another prominent feature in Southern gothic is its relation to voodoo and hoodoo.

The setting of these works is distinctly Southern. Some of these characteristics include exploring madness, decay and despair, continuing pressures of the past upon the present, particularly with the lost ideals of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy and continued racial hostilities.

Southern Gothic (also known as Gothic Americana, or Dark Country) is a genre of country music rooted in early jazz, gospel, Americana, gothic rock and post punk. Its lyrics often focus on dark subject matter. The genre shares thematic connections with the Southern Gothic genre of literature, and indeed the parameters of what makes something Gothic Americana appears to have more in common with literary genres than traditional musical ones. Songs often examine poverty, criminal behavior, religious imagery, death, ghosts, family, lost love, alcohol, murder, the devil, and betrayal. Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska (1982) was influenced by the writings of Flannery O'Connor. Athens, Georgia–based alternative rock band R. E. M. displayed a Southern Gothic influence with their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction (1985). J. D. Wilkes, frontman of the band Legendary Shack Shakers, described Southern Gothic music as "[taking] an angle that there’s something grotesque and beautiful in the traditions of the South, the backdrop of Southern living." Ethel Cain's music has been described as "Southern Gothic Pop," often focusing on themes such as intergenerational trauma, Christianity, grotesque violence, poverty, and abuse, and she often credits inspiration to the works of Southern Gothic writers such as Flannery O’Connor.

The Southern Gothic genre comes to the stage in many different ways. Southern Gothic fiction writers like Carson McCullers and Zora Neale Hurston adapted their own work for the stage in language heavy productions of The Member of the Wedding and Spunk. Playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Beth Henley, and Jacqueline Goldfinger translated elements of Southern Gothic aesthetic to the stage and added theatrical elements such as stylized movement, dialogue, and design. Examples of Southern Gothic plays include the Pulitzer Prize winner A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), the popular The Jacksonian (2014), and the Yale Prize winner Bottle Fly (2018). In addition, many Southern Gothic novels and short stories have been adapted for the stage by artists who are not the original authors. The Tony Award winning musical The Color Purple by Alice Walker is a prime example of this approach to theatricalization of the Southern Gothic genre. The Color Purple is an adaptation of the novel with music by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, Stephen Bray, and Marsha Norman which has been performed around the country constantly since its world premiere at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in 2004.

The images of Great Depression photographer Walker Evans are seen to evoke the visual depiction of the Southern Gothic; Evans claimed: "I can understand why Southerners are haunted by their own landscape". Another noted Southern Gothic photographer was surrealist Clarence John Laughlin, who photographed cemeteries, plantations, and other abandoned places throughout the American South (primarily Louisiana) for nearly 40 years.