With his collected works, titled What About This, recently released, Frank Stanford has been resurrected in searing splendor. My thesis introduction will focus on Stanford’s first published collection, The Singing Knives. I chose The Singing Knives as the critical component to my thesis because of Stanford’s gritty presentation of poor-white Southern culture through his incorporation of Southern Gothic elements, such as the grotesque, and violent imagery often preoccupied with blood. With his penchant for the surreal, Stanford demonstrates a serious affinity for juxtaposition, particularly in his use of the grotesque and strange in proximity to the ordinary. What Stanford accomplishes so magnificently is the ability to make disconcerting and, at times, disturbing images beautiful and poignant. Along with juxtaposition, I will examine how Stanford uses anaphora and conceits toward the purpose of mythic narrative. I plan to follow this critical introduction with a minimum of forty pages of original poetry.

Church of Bone is a manuscript of original poetry exploring themes of family, class, religion, and voice.

The term "Southern Gothic literature" is frequently used in discussions of works of fiction and plays, but poetry is often left out of the conversation. The critical introduction takes into consideration the established definition and traditional elements of Southern Gothic literature as they are applied to fiction and plays in order to find the elements of poetry that constitute the Gothic in American poetry of the South. I discuss the works of Natasha Trethewey and Andrew Hudgins and show how they can be considered modern-day Southern Gothic poets since their poetry contains freakish characters, an obsession with the unchangeable, and violent imagery. Then, I consider how my own work shares with Natasha Trethewey's and Andrew Hudgins's poetry some of these same attributes found in Southern Gothic fiction, thus belonging to the same tradition.

Set in mythical Humble County, Georgia, Days of the Endless Corvette tells the story of Earl Mulvaney, a high-school dropout and auto mechanic. Earl loves Ellen, the brainy and beautiful girl next door, who unfortunately must marry Troy, the star of the high school football team. Throughout the book Earl labors on his “Endless Corvette,” a project as impossible as trying to build a perpetual motion machine. Earl has noticed that each time he takes something apart and rebuilds it, there are leftover parts. He reasons that by disassembling and reassembling his boss’s ’59 Corvette, and saving the leftover pieces each time, eventually he will have enough parts to build an entire car, leaving the original behind. The novel ends with the suggestion that perhaps Earl has succeeded at his project, which stands as a metaphor not only for Earl’s hopeless love, but other searches for answers to life’s perplexities.

If I am anything, I am a Kentuckian, which means I appreciate a good storyteller. In my writing, I hope to bring back some dignity to the “lost cause” of the good values from a broken culture. While I am not quite “southern” enough to qualify as a writer of Southern Gothic fiction, I can relate to this brand of identity crisis in which someone wants to maintain an archaic mindset in a culture charging towards “progress.” As technology and corporate success take precedence over a genteel and pastoral soul, our collective competitiveness has crippled a quaint future of back porch comforts. Being well-read or holding open doors won’t pay for student loans, and there is no such thing as stars in our crowns anymore. For many regions of Kentucky, there is this conflict within the graying of small town communities. My region is one of these. As time marches on, the agrarian lifestyle itself becomes industrialized, and these old family farms, upon which small towns are built, are not self-sustaining. In my stories, I capture the perspectives of a rural community’s personalities. My Regionalism may be dated, but then so are the small town values. With these short stories, I hope to create a collection of characters whose backgrounds may be singular but whose messages are universal. My stories are about the universal fear of loneliness. Perry and White, the cameo characters, pop up throughout because they epitomize this with their irrational companionship. “The Ancient Art of Smile-Making,” “A Well Meaning Marionette,” “The Peacock Cloister,” and “In the Garden, Swallowing Pearls” are essentially about this innate need for company. “Murdered in a Good Dress” and “Myrtle Slog” illustrate the homesickness experienced by those who divorce themselves from closeness of the rural community. Sometimes we call “friendship” kitschy and cliché. And why is that? I made Perry and White’s bond a bit absurd because it is almost ridiculous that there could be a person in the wild world who would sacrifice themselves.

We are the stories we tell. Folk and fairy tales are reflections of the cultures that pass them down. Contemporary literary traditions, such as the Southern Gothic and tales of magical realism, also provide unique ways of responding to concerns within our society. This thesis attempts to merge these literary traditions to create a collection of Southern folk and fairy tales. These stories vary in style from very traditional fairy tales to more modern styles of magical realism and lyrical poetry. This collection was crafted after studying an extensive reading list of novels and short story collections written by masters of the aforementioned genres. Using the setting of the South through the lens of Fabulism, themes of generational trauma, uncontrolled instincts, and hypocrisy are explored.

Grotesque elements in literature are often negatively viewed as an author’s attempt to simply twist reality in an effort to shock or entertain the reader. However, as I explain in my critical introduction, this view disregards the potential of the grotesque. It often has a specific purpose within a plot. It reveals things about characters that would not otherwise be exposed. I discuss this function of the grotesque in the works of Flannery O’Connor, Edgar Allan Poe, Truman Capote, and Brad Watson, and then show how these authors’ uses of the grotesque have influenced my own writing. In my collection of short fiction, each story contains grotesque elements that reveal and emphasize my characters’ hopes and fears.

With the success of podcasts like Serial and This American Life's S-Town, the calamity of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and the dawning of "Trump's America" as a regional branding, Appalachia has once again found itself laid bare on the national stage. As the romanticization of Appalachia as poor, packing, and white persists, the question becomes: how can Appalachian peoples access these negative images as tools of resistance, reformation, and community making? How does an American gothic find home in Appalachian narratives? This project explores clashes between national othering and local othering in Appalachian identity making as a tangible production of an Appalachian grotesque, a grotesque constructed through the subversion of the modern American gothic as a critical model for exploring Appalachian identity, particularly nationally othered and queered identities. The scope of this project ranges from contemporary, such as the popular memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016) and the record breaking podcast S-Town (2016), as well as Robert Gipe's debut novel, Trampoline (2015), and their historical counterparts: the 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People and the 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. Through the lens of contemporary gothic readings of identity that come to form the grotesque, a framework for deconstructing notions of Appalachian fatalism begins to emerge. By specifically looking at ideas of violence, whether economic, cultural, or physical, and theories of erasure through the lens of land distribution and acquisition in Appalachia and its effect on self and community identity built up in the anchoring texts, defining and cultivating an Appalachian grotesque allows for a quantifying of Appalachian persistence within a history of critical thought, for better or for worse, as a way of both critiquing and fortifying the identity of Appalachia. / Master of Arts / The narrative of Appalachia, as white, poor, uneducated, barefoot, etc. that defines conceptions of the grotesque in contemporary media, such as more classic movies like 1972’s Deliverance, the tale of four ‘city boys’ from Atlanta during a bloody trip through the mountains, most famous for its “Dueling Banjos” scene, or more recent movies such as 2017’s Logan Lucky, a heist movie centered around two brothers’ plot to rob a NASCAR race in North Carolina, interacts with concepts of American masculinity and femininity through two prominent categories: hunger and disgust. Through the literary positioning of the body as a site in which hunger and disgust interact/react, as well as the subsequent relationship between sex and desire as defining features of a productive, and reproductive body, southern gothic tropes are encapsulated and reimagined through a grotesque Appalachian lens. It is through this cyclical process of hunger and disgust, and sex, desire, and production, in the social, political, and economic spheres that an Appalachian notion of the grotesque is formed.

This study seeks to question old and common misconceptions concerning the american literary genre Southern Gothic. By using the carnival theory, the theory about the "grotesque" by Mikhail Bakhtin, this study seeks to explain and reach a better understanding of some works defined as Southern Gothic - so called because of the significance that is attributed in the genre to the geographical location in the southern United states. This study analyzes carnivalesque transgression in short story collections by Flannery O´Connor, Eudora Welty and Dorothy Allison, and the main purpose is to investigate if the genre really is as dark as it is often described by critics; pessimistic, absurdly shocking and without any affirmation regarding the beauty and strength of life.  Transgression is here defined as the transgression made by fictional characters when their bodies and their actions refuses to conform to the norms established by "the official world". By using Bachtins terminology my main thesis is to investigate positive and life-affirming transgression in A Good Man is Hard to Find, A Curtain of Green and Trash. The study further investigates the ways in which the bodies of the fictional characters become grotesque and in what way the characters through their behaviour become carnivalesque. The short stories are also compared with eachother from both a tematic and historic perspective: can changes through time be observed? Does the grotesque form or expression change in any way from Welty to Allison? The conclusion of the study is that both grotesque and carnivalesque forms can be found in the short stories, and it can be considered carnivalesue in a true Bakhtinian way, as both positive and affirming. The study also finds that the grotesque tends to become more positive and life-affirming through time.

The succeeding chapters of this thesis are concerned with Carson McCullers' method of handling the Gothic. Their purpose is to describe the modern Gothic elements in McCullers' first three novels: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946) and in her novella: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943).