Often brutal and painful, Stella Maris knifes into religion, whiteness, class, sex, beauty,
Southernness, and aging at the margins of the United States's southernmost point.
Being born and bred in Newcastle, St Ives was always that little bit too far away so ever since moving to south west London, I'd always planned to utilise my newly found
southernness to explore the places I'd heard so much about.
"O'Connor's point registers twice," he explains, "once in ['The Grotesque in Southern Fiction'] and once in the story: writers (including self-consciously southern writers like herself caught in the path of the Dixie Limited) work through previous writing, which replaces the 'natural.' For the southern writer that means self-consciously foregrounding
southernness as a set of representations already in cultural place" (161).
Then again, perhaps that effort is a little too obvious: While Hiddleston wears his character's
Southernness like a carefully tailored suit, Olsen's seems to have seeped several layers beneath her skin, and she brings a vital sense of livedin authenticity to her scenes.
The bookAEs 33 chapters are grouped in thematic sections on class and politics, music, popular culture, race/ethnicity, the sacred,
Southernness, sports, and Southern institutions.
"Stupid Is as Stupid Says: Vocal Performance and
Southernness in Forrest Gump." FM 4.2 (2013): 40-43.
This closed loop culminated during the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, when the image of "
Southernness" that Derby promoters had so carefully burnished prompted reformers and protestors to choose the famed infield as the site of their protests.
Most of the essays offer a real sense of the show's vibrancy and deliberate, self-conscious invocation of a whole range of tropes, cliches and stereotypes around
Southernness, Gothic and vampires, making the collection an entertaining as well as informative read.