Tell-Tale Talks Featuring: Joshua Barton
April 8 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Check back in late March to reserve tickets.
Join us at The Poe Museum on Wednesday, April 8th for a Tell-Tale Talk featuring Professor Joshua Barton on “How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken”: The Tarnished Mirror of Southern Gothic Literature.
“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken”: The Tarnished Mirror of Southern Gothic Literature
This talk will introduce Southern Gothic fiction as a genre, focusing on how its decaying settings, eccentric characters, and moral tension reveal the cultural anxieties of the postbellum American South. Moving beyond haunted houses and grotesqueries, we will explore how writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams use distortion to expose themes of guilt and social decline. We’ll look at how the uncanny nature of Southern Gothic fiction often serves as a mirror to reflect the cultural and historical pressures of the American South, while also offering a vicious critique of its past. Through this discussion, Barton invite you to examine how the elements of these stories function as tools for social critique and psychological insight.
About Joshua Barton:
Joshua Barton is a professor of writing and literature and a lecturer on horror content of all kinds. He attended George Mason University as an undergraduate, where he completed a BA in English in 2009; for his MA in literature, he attended Southern New Hampshire University. His key area of academic research is horror literature, with a particular focus on Gothic fiction, haunted house stories, and feminist horror. He has taught at American University, George Mason University, and Virginia Commonwealth University, and developed horror literature courses with an emphasis on American monsters and cultural analysis. He is also a frequent collaborator with Profs & Pints, where he has lectured on everything from Victorian ghost stories to folk horror to the link between romance and monsters. Outside of literature, his interests include games (of all kinds), baking, and dogs!
