THE OUTBACK IN SOUTHERN GOTHIC

American Gothic is a complex cultural and literary phenomenon provided by the regional specificity of the USA. Two peculiar traditions of Gothic literature are placed under the “umbrella” of the term – the New England tradition, which is more focused on the immersion into the depths of the human psyche and carefully records various reflections of characters, and the Southern tradition, which owes its emergence to the heavy agonizing of Southerners on the death of the mythological beautiful South as a result of the Civil War. Due to the specific sociocultural life in the South, there were no large urban centers; the heart of the South is the outback, with its characteristic rootedness in the traditions of the past. The Southern outback is rather a topos, a generalized place of unfolding of meanings associated with the unique Southern experience of life, often a set of stable fable formulas, as well as common motifs, problems and plots. The article discusses some typical features of Southern Gothic poetics