Q 01/05

Southern Gothic fiction is set in which region of the United States?

A) New England

B) The American South

C) The Pacific Northwest

D) The Great Plains

Answer · why

B) The American South

It highlights violence and cruelty as features of the region's culture.

Q 02/05

Which novelist critiqued the "Southern Gothic School" in 1935 as full of "aimless violence"?

A) Margaret Mitchell

B) Ellen Glasgow

C) Willa Cather

D) Edith Wharton

Answer · why

B) Ellen Glasgow

Like the original term Gothic, the label began as an insult.

Q 03/05

Which Mississippi writer said of the Southern Gothic label, "They better not call me that!"?

A) Flannery O'Connor

B) Eudora Welty

C) Carson McCullers

D) Harper Lee

Answer · why

B) Eudora Welty

Her Jackson house is now a National Historic Landmark museum.

Q 04/05

Unlike classic Gothic's barbaric past, Southern Gothic shows what persisting in the South?

A) Feudal law

B) Social trauma

C) Pagan ritual

D) Royal bloodlines

Answer · why

B) Social trauma

The genre dismantles the romantic mythology of the antebellum South.

Q 05/05

Which 19th-century humorist's grotesques are cited as early Gothic treatments of the South?

A) Bret Harte

B) Henry Clay Lewis

C) Ambrose Bierce

D) Joel Chandler Harris

Answer · why

B) Henry Clay Lewis

He was a doctor who wrote as Madison Tensas, the Louisiana Swamp Doctor.