Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, just released by the Louisiana State University Press. This collection of essays has been coedited by George Mason University’s own Eric Gary Anderson, along with professors Daniel Cross Turner (Coastal Carolina University) and Taylor Hagood (Florida Atlantic University). Undead Souths is a field-defining work that explores diverse forms of haunting and horror associated with the American South.
When William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” he probably wasn’t thinking about zombies. But these famous lines, which themselves rise up again and again, call to mind the pervading presence of southern undeadness—racial, ethnic, political, economic, historical. Depictions of the undead in the South comprise current versions, such as the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead, yet extend across a variety of media and historical periods, from well-known authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor; to Civil War battlefield daguerreotypes and Confederate ghosts; to the haunted architectures of old New Orleans; and to vintage horror films like White Zombie. As Undead Souths reveals, physical manifestations 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. The result is an engaging, inclusive collection that establishes cultural crossings between the South and other regions within and outside the U.S.
John Wharton Lowe (Barbara Methvin Distinguished Professor, University of Georgia) has called Undead Souths a “wild and heady brew of essays, bubbling over novels, film, graphic novels, poetry, and comics” that assembles “a constellation of rising stars of the new Southern Studies, whose startling new insights chill and thrill. The national mania for all things ‘undead’ has always had an underlying set of quite serious meanings, and they are plumbed here with panache and ingenuity.” María del Pilar Blanco (Trinity College, Oxford University) describes Undead Souths as “a timely and dynamic collection of essays, arriving as it does at a moment in which the ghosts of the U.S. South are returning in the most disturbing ways,” while Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University) praises the anthology as “required reading for those with interests in the American Gothic and American culture more broadly.”
In 2014, Eric Gary Anderson won a University Teaching Excellence Award with special acknowledgment of his contributions to General Education at Mason. In addition to his book, American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions (University of Texas Press, 1999), he has published upwards of twenty essays in edited volumes and journals, including pieces in PMLA, American Literary History, Early American Literature, Southern Spaces, Mississippi Quarterly, and South to a New Place. His most recent work includes contributions to Critical Terms for Southern Studies, the Cambridge Robert Frost in Context, and The Oxford Handbook to the Literature of the US South. From 2012-14, he served as President of The Society for the Study of Southern Literature.
The book is available from Louisiana State University Press as well as major online booksellers.
September 11, 2015