Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: At the suggestion of her friend Tennessee Williams, Southern writer Carson McCullers adapted her novella "The Member of the Wedding" into a touching and poignant play that was an enormous success when it opened on Broadway in 1950, and has long since become a classic of the American theater. With compassion, veracity and wit, in "The Member of the Wedding" Carson McCullers depicts the intrinsically enmeshed lives of whites and blacks in the American South. Julie Harris became a star playing the awkward, twelve-year-old tomboy Frankie Adams, who falls deeply in love with her older brother and his fiance. Exhilarated by her naive conviction that being a member of their wedding means she will become what she calls the "we of me," Frankie is devastated when she learns she is not invited on the honeymoon. Bernice Sadie Brown, who has experienced a lifetime of love and loss, is a surrogate mother for Frankie. Portrayed on stage and in the film versions by the great Ethel Waters, Bernice is an epic character, fiercely loyal, down-to-earth, and centered by deep faith.

Adapts Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, as well as the latest in gender and psychoanalytic theory, to the major works of acclaimed southern writer Carson McCullers. This innovative reconsideration of the themes of Carson McCullers's fiction argues that her work has heretofore suffered under the pall of narrow gothic interpretations, obscuring a more subversive agenda. By examining McCullers's major novels--The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe--Gleeson-White locates a radical and specific form the grotesque in the author's fiction: the liberating and redemptive possibilities of errant gender roles and shifting sexuality. She does this by employing Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, which is both affirming and revolutionary, and thereby moves McCullers's texts beyond the "gloom and doom" with which they have been charged for over fifty years. The first chapter explores female adolescence by focusing on McCullers's tomboys in the context of oppressive southern womanhood. The second chapter analyzes McCullers's fascinating struggle to depict homosexual desire outside of traditional stereotypes. Glesson-White then examines McCullers's portrayals of feminine and masculine gender through the tropes of cross-dressing, transvestism, and masquerade. The final chapter takes issue with earlier readings of androgyny in the texts to suggest a more useful concept McCullers herself called "the hybrid." Underpinning the whole study is the idea of a provocative, dynamic from of the grotesque that challenges traditional categories of normal and abnormal. Because the characters and themes of McCullers's fiction werecreated in the 1940s and 1950s, a time of tension between the changing status of women and the southern ideal of womanhood, they are particularly fertile ground for a modern reexamination of this nature. Gleeson-White's study will be valued by scholars of American literature and gender and queer studies, by students of psychology, by academic libraries, and by readers of Carson McCullers. Strange Bodies is a thoughtful, highly credible analysis that adds dimension to the study of southern literature.

在线阅读本书
With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for all various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attune to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.
Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the NEW YORK TIMES. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best. When she was only twenty-three, CarsonMcCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. Shewas very special, one of America's superlativewriters who conjures up a vision of existence asterrible as it is real, who takes us on shatteringvoyages into the depths of the spiritual isolationthat underlies the human condition. This novel isthe work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers'senduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strangeyoung girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a smallSouthern town, the cosmos universal and eternal.The characters are the damned, the voiceless, therejected. Some fight their loneliness withviolence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some-- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personalsearch for beauty.

约翰（艾伦·阿金 Alan Arkin 饰）是一名聋哑人，在小镇上的一间礼品店里工作，听觉和语言的缺失让他拥有更加敏锐的洞察力，也更加容易看透人和事的本质。约翰住在租来的房间里，这个房间原来的主人是一个名叫米克（桑德拉·洛克 Sondra Locke 饰）的女孩。
米克和家人的关系很糟糕，在孤独中她对约翰产生了兴趣，可是，对于米克来说，约翰只是她派遣寂寞的工具而已，所以当她找到了新男友后，便将约翰置之度外。约翰遇见了一个内心有创伤的医生，一个无家可归的流浪汉，在约翰的陪伴和帮助下，他们都找到了人生新的方向，可是，没有一个人知道，在约翰的内心里，孤独和绝望的深渊正在将他缓慢吞噬。

麦卡勒斯继《心是孤独的猎手》之后推出另一部长篇力作。曾被改编成电影，由伊丽莎白·泰勒、马龙·白兰度、约翰·赫斯顿等巨星主演。
小说以1930年代驻扎在美国南方的一支军队为背景，讲述了双性恋者潘德腾上尉，因好色而有魅力的兰顿上校的到来且与其妻骚动而轻佻的利奥诺拉有染，生活被搅扰得翻天覆地的故事。1941年小说发表时，评论界并未真正明白如何解读其相对丑闻性的主题。但《时代》杂志的一位编辑却写道：“几乎在所有方面，这类素材所造就的不过是一类有关男同性恋者的附庸风雅的情节剧。而麦卡勒斯则以罕见的散文体天赋，简洁而富洞察力地讲述她的故事。”在创作这部小说之时，麦卡勒斯与利夫斯的婚姻正处于崩溃的边缘，而她的这第二部长篇小说展示的正是其关于人类情感疏离和不可行之爱的标志性主题。

《心是孤独的猎手》作者麦卡勒斯的第一部长篇小说，也是她一举成名的作品和最具震撼力的代表作，居“现代文库20世纪百佳英文小说”第17位，曾被评为百部最佳同性恋小说之一。
故事的背景类似于《伤心咖啡馆之歌》中炎热的南方小镇。小说中两个聋哑男子的同性之爱令人感动，而同性之恋又是若有若无的，时而激烈，时而沉默。主旨凸显的是麦卡勒斯式的主题：孤独是绝对的，最深切的爱也无法改变人类最终极的孤独。绝望的孤独与其说是原罪，不如说是原罪的原罪。

《婚礼的成员》被认为是麦卡勒斯最成熟的作品，上世纪50年代由她本人改编为戏剧在百老汇连续上演501场，获得巨大成功。主人公是个小姑娘，她的梦想，就是参加哥哥的婚礼，然后和他们一起去度蜜月，远走高飞。但是在小姑娘的世界里，“在那个绿色的、疯狂的夏季”，每一个孤独的人都被深锁在各自的内心空间，无法进行任何有意义的交流。

《伤心咖啡馆之歌》收入了麦卡勒斯的七篇中短篇小说，其中包括最著名的《伤心咖啡馆之歌》，以及麦卡勒斯十七岁时发表的处女作《神童》。
诸篇小说的背景多样，有都市生活的，有大学生活的，也有家庭生活的，但其反映的主旨似仍在人物的内心世界，以及那种没来由的孤独感。书中除《伤心咖啡馆之歌》和《家庭困境》曾被引介入国内，其余均为首次面世。