Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in English
First Advisor
Jaime Harker
Second Advisor
Jay Watson
Third Advisor
Karen Raber
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
This dissertation expands our understanding of how nonhuman animal figures, symbols, and encounters within southern literature have had ideologically profound impacts on our conceptions of humanity, southernness, and relationality. This dissertation examines prose fiction, including short stories, novellas, and novels, from four influential southern writers—Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Flannery O’Connor—who were all actively engaged with representing, critiquing, and expanding American conceptions of the south, the nation, and the ‘human’ at midcentury. With an understanding of southern literature as a rich site for not only regional representation but also broader disruptions of national injustices and ideologies of domination and systemic oppression, “Southern Animals” is temporally focused on the turbulent period of American history that followed the Great Depression but preceded nationally-recognized integration. This project contends that traditional southern literary themes often associated with southern literature during this period—violence, the grotesque, sexual (and nonsexual) deviance, modernity, and racial hauntings—have been influenced by representations of complex encounters with the nonhuman animals who heavily populate these texts.
“Southern Animals'' seeks to fill some gaps in literary animal criticism, particularly by focusing on southern literature. Reading animals as both symbols and agential characters allows us to better understand how they historically and presently impact politics, cultural perception, and change, so I argue that these writers represent how literary animals, animality, and animal encounters can: expose ramifications of white violence on interspecies intimacy; disrupt capitalist, anthropocentric ideologies of labor, agency, and resistance; expand heteronormative conceptions of erotics and relationality; and destabilize systems of confinement and segregation. Southern Animals merges southern literary studies and critical animal studies to hopefully document and magnify how literary animals have been more than symbols in southern literature, acting instead as creative agents of political disruption, resistance, and change. Overall, “Southern Animals” argues that when taken all together, these texts embrace multispecies encounters as edgy, important, and powerful—both personally and politically—in an ever-increasing confining and crushing world, one not unlike our own today.
Recommended Citation
McKinney, Kacee M., "Southern Animals: Multispecies Encounters in Midcentury Southern Fiction" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2841.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2841