Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
Animals Without Funerals: Nonhuman Hauntings and Narrative Landscapes of the U.S. South offers a new approach to “the uncanny” in relation to “ghostly” animals. To do so, I examine literary representations in conjunction with natural histories of actual animals, focusing on novels by significant twentieth and twenty-first century southern writers William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, Linda Hogan, and Barbara Kingsolver, to show how these animals are each figured as distinctly “southern” and “ghostly” in the southern imaginary. What makes these ghostly animals especially significant, however, is that they are rendered as “haunting” and “haunted” twice in both the literary and material landscapes of the U.S. South. I argue that these ghostly animals embody a form of double uncanniness that creates a recursive loop between the real and the imagined animal, wherein the animal is never fully real or imagined yet is strangely also both at the same time. Ultimately, this double uncanniness reveals how attempts to depict animal death in literature are disrupted and/or remain incomplete because, on one hand, the ghostliness of the animal as an imagined construct loaded with symbolic meaning interferes with the ontological and material status of the real animal as an actual being, while on the other hand, the unaccountability of the real animal as itself unsettles anthropocentric images of the animal within human symbolic systems of meaning. More specifically, this dissertation focuses on the symbolic and material place of animals within literatures and cultures of the U.S. South, a regional and cultural space where the presence of animals has received little sustained academic attention. To address these gaps in U.S. Southern Studies and Animal Studies, this dissertation examines how southern writers engage with questions about the nonhuman animal, nonhuman hauntings, and species loss as a means by which to consider new modes of thinking about “the South” as both a symbolic and material place, about multiracial and multiethnic identities in the region, about environmental and social changes, and, on a larger scale—about human-animal relationships where the “ghostly” and the “real” are always in tension with one another.
Date
3-9-2026
Recommended Citation
Bills, Anna C., "Animals Without Funerals: Nonhuman Hauntings and Narrative Landscapes of the U.S. South" (2026). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 7007.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/7007
Committee Chair
Bibler, Michael
LSU Acknowledgement
1
LSU Accessibility Acknowledgment
1