Philip Emery, who was a North Staffordshire -based writer the last time I looked, has just published his 2018 PhD thesis on the Loughborough University open repository. “Revivifying the Ur-text: a reconstruction of sword-&-sorcery as a literary form” asks if, given this literary genre’s relative neglect in recent decades, it is possible to identify the genre’s core characteristics and then use these “to create a work that realizes the form’s potential to exist as literature”. Firstly he explores the structural development of the Ur-genre as it emerged in the stories of R.E. Howard (influenced by H.P. Lovecraft in terms of the horror elements), then surveys de Camp’s later contributions and distortions to the genre, and generally seeks to identify the “pristine elements” at the core of the genre’s once-flourishing form.