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Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Publisher: The Palingenesis Project (Wermod and Wermod Publishing Group)
ISBN: 1909606006
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Originally published in 1927 in a small-circulation amateur magazine, spanning the period from antiquity until the 1930s, and covering both the Anglo-American world and Continental Europe, Lovecraft’s essay remains unparallelled as a survey of horror literature in our hemisphere. Said literature’s emergence as a genre coincided with the institutional establishment of liberalism, which represents a diametrically opposed worldview. This would suggest that horror literature, even if inadvertently or subconsciously, represents an attempt at escaping the limitations of the secular, materialist, rationalist Weltanschauung of liberal modernity, as well as a desire for meaning in a world rendered meaningless through ‘liberation’ from hierarchies, folk traditions, the occult, and the supernatural. Also of interest is the fact that the aesthetics of Gothic horror are invariably and luxuriantly beautiful (if in a dark way), whereas the logical extreme of rationality (utilitarianism, standardisation) is inherently anti-aesthetic. Would this not indicate, then, that the Age of Reason marked the beginning of a process that concluded in late modernity with the wholesale destruction of beauty, except where it, or the counterfeiting of it, was dictated by economic necessity? If so, we may view Lovecraft’s essay not merely as a resource for those seeking entertainment within a genre of literature, but also a map for those seeking to escape, and begin to transcend, the despair engendered by a worldview that pronounced itself dead when someone spoke of ‘the end of history’.
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 74
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Book Description
"Supernatural Horror in Literature" is a 28,000 word essay by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, surveying the development and achievements of horror fiction as the field stood in the 1920s.
Author: Stephen Jones
Publisher: Pegasus Books
ISBN: 0605982015
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 506
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Book Description
”The reader would do well to remember that it is Lovecraft‘s shadow which overlies almost all of the important horror fiction.”—Stephen King Written by arguably the most important horror writer of the twentieth century, H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” traces the evolution of the genre from the early Gothic novels to the work of contemporary American and British authors. Throughout, Lovecraft acknowledges those authors and stories that he feels are the very finest the horror field has to offer: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Conan Doyle, each prefaced by Lovecraft's own opinions and insights in their work. This chilling collection also contains Henry James’ wonderfully atmospheric short novel The Turn of the Screw. For every fan of modern horror, here is an opportunity to rediscover the origins of the genre with some of most terrifying stories ever imagined.
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
ISBN: 9781500499457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 72
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Book Description
Supernatural Horror in Literature H. P. Lovecraft The Most Important Essay on Horror Literature"Supernatural Horror in Literature" is a long essay by the celebrated horror writer H. P. Lovecraft surveying the field of horror fiction. It was written between November 1925 and May 1927 and revised in 1933–1934. It was first published in 1927 in the one-shot magazine The Recluse. More recently, it was included in the collection Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.Lovecraft examines the roots of weird fiction in the gothic novel (relying heavily on Edith Birkhead's 1921 survey The Tale of Terror), and traces its development through such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe (who merits his own chapter), and Ambrose Bierce. Lovecraft names as the four "modern masters" of horror Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James.An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia calls the work "HPL's most significant literary essay and one of the finest historical analyses of horror literature." Upon reading the essay, M. R. James proclaimed Lovecraft's style "most offensive." However, Edmund Wilson, who was not an admirer of Lovecraft's fiction, praised the essay as a "really able piece of work...he had read comprehensively in this field — he was strong on the Gothic novelists — and writes about it with much intelligence".[4] David G. Hartwell has called "Supernatural Horror in Literature" " the most important essay on horror literature".THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to “uplift” the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.
Author: Sean Moreland
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319954776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This collection of essays examines the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft’s most important critical work, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Each chapter illuminates a crucial aspect of Lovecraft’s criticism, from its aesthetic, philosophical and literary sources, to its psychobiological underpinnings, to its pervasive influence on the conception and course of horror and weird literature through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays investigate the meaning of cosmic horror before and after Lovecraft, explore his critical relevance to contemporary social science, feminist and queer readings of his work, and ultimately reveal Lovecraft’s importance for contemporary speculative philosophy, film and literature.
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
Lovecraft's 'Supernatural horror in literature', first published in 1927, is a historical survey of horror literature, with insights into the nature, development and history of the weird tale. Lovecraft discusses horror writing in the Renaissance, the first Gothic novels of the late 18th century, the revolutionary importance of Edgar Allen Poe, the work of figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce and William Hope Hodgson and the four 'modern masters' of the time - Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and M.R. James. In this annotated edition, S.T. Joshi has provided commentary on many points.
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780967321585
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
From the Pest zone: Stories from New York.
Author:
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 443
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Book Description
This Combo Collection (Set of 3 Books) includes All-time Bestseller Books. This anthology contains: The Dunwich Horror : H. P. Lovecraft's Best Classic Horror Thrillers (Best Classic Horror Novels of All Time) Supernatural Horror in Literature : H. P. Lovecraft's Best Classic Horror Thrillers The Shadow Out of Time
Author: William F. Touponce
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810892200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167
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Book Description
In his classic study Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft discusses the emergence of what he called spectral literature—literature that involves the gothic themes of the supernatural found in the past but also considers modern society and humanity. Beyond indicating how authors of such works derived pleasure from a sense of cosmic atmosphere, Lovecraft did not elaborate on what he meant by the term spectral as a form of haunted literature concerned with modernity. In Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys, William F. Touponce examines what these three masters of weird fiction reveal about modernity and the condition of being modern in their tales. In this study, Touponce confirms that these three authors viewed storytelling as a kind of journey into the spectral. Furthermore, he explains how each identifies modernity with capitalism in various ways and shows a concern with surpassing the limits of realism, which they see as tied to the representation of bourgeois society. The collected writings of Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury span the length of the tumultuous twentieth century with hundreds of stories. By comparing these authors, Touponce also traces the development of supernatural fiction since the early 1900s. Reading about how these works were tied to various stages of capitalism, one can see the connection between supernatural literature and society. This study will appeal to fans of the three authors discussed here, as well as to scholars and others interested in the connection between literature and society, criticism of supernatural fiction, the nature of storytelling, and the meaning and experience of modernity.
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781482063714
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 78
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Book Description
Supernatural Horror in Literature By H. P. Lovecraft Horror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvellous popularity and earned him the nickname of "Monk" Lewis. This young author, educated in Germany and saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror in forms more violent than his gentle predecessor had ever dared to think of; and produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness.
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88
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Book Description
Supernatural Horror in Literature is a 28,000 word essay by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, surveying the development and achievements of horror fiction as the field stood in the 1920s and 30s. The essay was researched and written between November 1925 and May 1927, first published in August 1927, and then revised and expanded during 1933-1934. The terror and horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature" is a long-form essay that discusses the history of terror, fear, and horror embodied in literature. Lovecraft's essay begins with a description of the psychology of the human race from its infancy, wherein fear is one of "[t]he oldest and strongest emotions of mankind . . . and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." As Lovecraft makes quite clear throughout this essay, it is this fear that must be exercised in the "fear-literature" or "horror-literature," as he calls them, that is penned by the multitude of writers in this genre.Much of the essay is a historical review of the Gothic literary tradition from its origins in the mid-eighteenth century through the present-day (which at the time of writing was the late 1920s). Lovecraft touches upon the aristocratic origins of Gothic fiction in Britain, the Continental influences that altered the genre, as well as the American Gothic transformation that continued to breathe life into the tradition.Aside from being an essay highlighting the masters in the field, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" lays down Lovecraft's aesthetic vision for those who write this kind of fiction. For Lovecraft, despite the fact that "the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos . . ." Yes, this was written forty years before man walked on the moon, but I believe his statement still holds true. Despite all our voyages into outer space, the universe is still so vast and unknown to us that this stirs us not just with awe but with fear and terror as well.Lovecraft tells us that in "The true weird tale . . . [a] certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, . . . of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space." Lovecraft is saying that the best type of weird fiction reaches beyond Nature's boundaries--her fixed, orderly laws, which by being routine allow us to feel secure--and opens up the mind to the suggestion that on the border of the comfort zone provided by Nature there are malignant, unknown forces that can trespass at any moment and shatter our sense of security, causing us to fully experience the primitive terror and fear of our ancestors when they encountered the unknown."Atmosphere," Lovecraft writes, "is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation." This belief goes hand-in-hand with his concern over impressing upon the mind the sensations and emotions of fear and terror in response to experiencing the unknown forces of the world. All literature should make readers think and feel, but fiction especially is about getting readers to respond emotionally; responding to literature through feeling and sensation is fundamental to reading fiction, to reacting to events and characters in the tale being told, and this holds most true, according to Lovecraft, for the weird tale and fear-literature."The one test of the really weird tale is simply this--whether of not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; . . . [such as] the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim." Lovecraft's goal...
