Abstract
This project examines the role of heroism in Southern Bastards, a contemporary comic book series by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour, which intentionally departs from the long development and conventional portrayal of heroic figures in Southern literature. Drawing upon narratological studies as a basis for critical inquiry, this paper elucidates and reflects on the connections between narrative perspective and portrayals of the heroic. Heroics, and by extension honor and morality, are constructs dependent on the larger culture they inhabit, and narrative perspective in particular can manipulate who or what is seen as heroic. The fabricated sense of honor and chivalry demonstrated by romantic Southern literature has no place in Southern Bastards, which plays with multiple perspectives to show that such a fantasy is fundamentally incompatible with the realities of the South. Southern Bastards asks that we recalibrate our notions of the heroic to better address the complexities of race, gender, and class in the modern South.
How to Cite
Williams, S., (2020) ““She’s Got a Big-Ass Machine Gun”: Rethinking Southern Heroic Narratives in Aaron and Latour’s Southern Bastards”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 33(1).
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