From Southern Insularity to Transculturality in Carson McCullers’ Novella The Ballad of the Sad Café
For the past decades, critics have examined how Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café disrupts fixed identities of gender, social hierarchy, and regional belonging, suggesting that the novella’s meaning exceeds a purely Southern tradition and invites broader interpretation. Going beyond this...
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| 出版年: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
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| 第一著者: | |
| フォーマット: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| 言語: | Anglais |
| 出版事項: |
European journal of American studies
2026
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| 主題: | |
| オンライン･アクセス: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| 要約: | For the past decades, critics have examined how Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café disrupts fixed identities of gender, social hierarchy, and regional belonging, suggesting that the novella’s meaning exceeds a purely Southern tradition and invites broader interpretation. Going beyond this body of scholarship, this essay argues that the text can be more productively understood through the lens of transcultural theory, a framework that has not yet been systematically applied to it. While the narrative is firmly situated within the socio-cultural context of the American South—with its rigid hierarchies, behavioral codes, and insular community life—this apparent coherence is continually unsettled by characters and relational dynamics that resist culturally bounded readings. The essay contends that the text’s Southern Gothic surface conceals a deeper structure of cultural permeability. In particular, the café itself functions as a porous social and symbolic space in which identities, desires, and values circulate beyond the limits of a fixed regional culture, revealing the instability of cultural boundaries. |
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