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Lillian Smith ’s Killers of the Dream is somewhat of a hybrid – an essayistic autobiography, an introspective social critique of the Jim Crow South. Her urge to reach beyond the micro scale of autobiographic writing manifests itself at the very outset: the first chapter is titled “When I Was a Child” [emphasis added] – a title which suggests some degree of self-centeredness characteristic of a memoir . Yet the opening paragraph is concerned with collective experience, as reported by a third-person, omniscient narrator: “Even its children knew that the South was in trouble” (Smith 25). In the following four paragraphs the distant, off-stage perspective shifts into the perspective of “ we who were born in the South” (Smith 26). Only after such introduction does Smith proceed to actually speak for herself: “In this South I lived as a child and now live” (27). In fact Smith quite often sheds the individual, subjective “I” perspective, as if the first person singular voice was not suf...

Southern Gothic is a violence-ridden genre. Its subject matter, characters, and imagery are often disturbing and transgressive. However, this mode of writing does not necessarily rely on shock value, or our primal attraction to the repulsive. Some of the most successful Southern Gothic works offer multi-layered, contextualised depictions of violent behaviour, which should not be conflated with physical brutality. Southern Gothic authors more or less consciously describe in their works a full range of non-physical aggression which emanates from structural violence. There has been an ongoing semantic shift in the usage of the word “violence” itself. Due to sociocultural forces, its reference has expanded to include acts of aggression that cause harm via other means than physical force used face to face; for instance, World Health Organisation in its classification of violence includes also sexual and psychological attacks, as well as “deprivation or neglect” (Krug et al, 2002, p. 6...