Tuesday 19th October saw our second Literary Society lecture of the academic year, with Professor Susan Castillo Street (Harriet Beecher Stowe Professor of American Studies Emerita) speaking on Southern Gothic.

An audience comprising our Sixth Form students of English Literature and staff, alongside invited students and staff from Notting Hill & Ealing School and City of London Girls’ School, was engaged thoroughly by Professor Castillo’s insights into the genre, which had its roots in the American Civil War.

Professor Castillo’s talk focused on three exponents of Southern Gothic: Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘Po’ Sandy’ (1899), George Washington Cable’s ‘Belles Demoiselles Plantation’ (1907) and William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’ (1930). Particularly illuminating were Professor Castillo’s insights into the tropes associated with the genre, including houses and buildings in ruin (echoing traditional Gothic conventions, notably in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’) and the racialised doppelganger, a product of the complexities of race and familial backgrounds in the American South of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Professor Castillo also focused on the use of Southern dialects as they appear in the short stories and narrative method.

Our audience benefited hugely from this talk, not least our own Sixth Form English students who are studying American Literature of 1880-1940 as part of their A Level course. We are immensely grateful to Professor Castillo for giving up her time.