Search results
Drawing on Maggie Kilgour’s dictum that the Gothic activates a dormant past with the power to harm the present, this article explores the early modern histories invoked by the Regnum Congo, a sixteenth-century account of Africa featured in H. P. Lovecraft’s cannibal story ‘The Picture in the House’. The Regnum Congo taps into Lovecraft’s racism, instantiating, within and beyond the story, the racial and cultural convergence he dreaded. The tale’s cannibal resembles the Africans depicted in the Regnum Congo to a striking degree, even as his reverence for the book colours his putative status as a puritan. Integrating the book itself into the analysis enables a reading of the tale’s controversial cataclysmic ending as oneof several exemplars of Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s ‘Gothic thing-power’, which disrupts subject/object boundaries. The multifarious histories summoned by ‘Picture’ reflect Lovecraft’s own ambivalence about the past, as well as the possibilities of attention to Gothic pasts.
This article proposes a nautical perspective as a new branch for Lovecraft studies. To achieve this, I analyse the irruption of monsters from sublime ocean depths in three sea stories of the author: Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow over Innsmouth. Lovecrafts particular method draws on the legacy left by Edgar Allan Poe in relation to horrors at the sea and by Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood in terms of presenting nature as the origin of undefeatable horrors. His style results in what I propose to call Lovecraft‘s nautical Gothic. In it, the arrival of monstrous sea entities horrifies his protagonists who, because of their encounters, must accept the minor role of humanity in the vastness of the natural order.
This book explores a number of Alan Moore's works in various forms, including comics, performance, short prose and the novel, and presents a scholarly study of these texts. It offers additional readings to argue for a politically charged sense of Moore's position within the Gothic tradition, investigates surreal Englishness in The Bojeffries Saga, and discusses the doppelganger in Swamp Thing and From Hell. Radical environmental activism can be conceived as a Gothic politics invoking the malevolent spectre of a cataclysmic eco-apocalypse. The book presents Christian W. Schneider's treatment of the apocalyptic in Watchmen and a reassessment of the significance of liminality from the Gothic tradition in V for Vendetta. It explores the relationship between Moore's work and broader textual traditions, placing particular emphasis on the political and cultural significance of intertextual relationships and adaptations. A historically sensitive reading of From Hell connects Moore's concern with the urban environment to his engagement with a range of historical discourses. The book elucidates Moore's treatment of the superhero in relation to key Gothic novels such as The Castle of Otranto and presents an analysis of the nexus of group politics and survival in Watchmen. The book also engages in Moore's theories of art, magic, resurrections, and spirits in its discourse A Small Killing, A Disease of Language, and the Voice of the Fire. It also explores the insight that his adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, which are laced with heterocosms and bricolage, can yield for broader understandings of his forays into the occult.
recite to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can’t be sure, but we can always take a chance. H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Dunwich Horror’ 1 Might not the entire of Magic be described as traffic between That Which Is and That Which Is Not; between fact and fiction? If we are to speak of Magic as ‘The Art’, should we not also speak of Art
. Nyarlathotep . H. P. Lovecraft. Considering the immense impact of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories on modern culture, it might seem at first sight surprising how few of them have been filmed. Lovecraft wrote around sixty stories and three novellas, but only ten of these have served as the actual basis of feature films. Indeed, Dan O’Bannon has called Lovecraft ‘an unconquered film category
? A similar set of questions underlies H.P. Lovecraft’s tongue-in-cheek twentieth-century reboot of Frankenstein , ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’. Written in six parts and published serially from February through July of 1922 in the amateur publication Home Brew , ‘Herbert West’ – Lovecraft’s first professional fiction publication, for which he was paid the whopping sum of $5.00 per episode – tells the story of monomaniacal medical student Herbert West’s attempts to develop a chemical formula that will return life to the dead. Together with
Desire, disgust and dead women 183 9 Desire, disgust and dead women: Angela Carter’s re-writing women’s fatal scripts from Poe and Lovecraft Gina Wisker A ngela Carter’s writing is crucial to the rebirth of Gothic horror in the late twentieth century, and an impetus to read, or re-read, myth, fairy tale and the work of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft – each significant, acknowledged influences. Carter’s work deconstructs the consistently replayed, cautionary narrative of myth and fairy tale in which (mainly young) women are first represented as objects
the character. King is a comfortable read. 9 One major difference here is that Hoppenstand places the blame of this ‘safe’ or conservative mode of horror at the feet of H.P. Lovecraft, as the early twentieth century's most influential horror author and, through his ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature
WTO demonstrations of 1999 (Sust et al ., in VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2008 : 349–62; Malcolm-Clarke 2008 ; Miéville 2003 , 2011 ). These writers self-consciously re-appropriate the literary legacy and mythos of (modern) weird fiction as focalised by H. P. Lovecraft’s creative and critical work. The unknowingness and impenetrability of the weird is central to Miéville’s critique of Lovecraft and he conflates this with uniqueness in response to modernity. Lovecraft’s concern with racial degeneracy is inverted as the new weird promotes possibility in a multi
inspiration for the Engineers is also important, providing a counterpoint to the biomechanical xenomorph. Additionally, the origin of the Engineers in Blake's Zoas and angelic figures provides an unexpectedly bleak vision of the universe not usually associated with the Romantic artist. That another writer, H. P. Lovecraft, is more clearly a source of cosmic horror in the movie is to be expected and could easily be seen as complementing Giger's vision. And yet