A very obscure book of essays, Fearful Symmetries: Representations of Anxiety in Cultural, Literary and Political Discourses, University of Silesia, Poland, 2013. Appears to be in English, though neither Amazon UK or USA has heard of it. It has one Lovecraft essay.
Contents:
* Indian Zigzags – the Industrial Monster. (Cultural reaction to the British industrial imitation of Indian printed cotton fabrics in the 19th century)
* The Victorian Culture and the Fear of the Talented Woman in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
* The Renaissance Plus ultra and the Recurrence of Non plus ultra as Refelcted in the Poetry of John Donne and John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost.
* “To Be Saved by Chaos”: “Emancipation” of Self by Mutilation and Perversion. Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters and Choke.
* Who’s Afraid of the Supermarket: A Study of Andrzej Wojcik’s and Ewan Jones-Morris’s Semi-documentary Brand New World.
* Civilisation, Fear and Trauma in Doris Lessing’s writing.
* Masochism and Its (Dis)contents: The Politics of In-Yer-Face Theatre and Mark Ravenhill’s Bodies in Crisis.
* What Else Is Civilization For? Narration Overcoming Fear and Trauma in Graham Swift.
* “Seek and Ye Shall Mind” – Conspiracy Theories and the Mechanisms of Online Exposure.
* Civilization Renewal Project – the Ultimate Solution of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.
* Indulging a Terrorist’s Fears: A Critical Evaluation of Theodore Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future.
* “The Gently Budding Rose”: Greeks and Fear in Teodor Parnicki’s Historical Novel The End of “The Concord of Nations”.
* “Fetch Me my Feathers and Amber”: Gary Snyder on Civilization and the Primitive.
* Original Sin, Fear and Metaphysical Poetry.
* Gods for the Final Days: Selected Religious Systems Devised by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Philip K. Dick.
In the mid-twentieth century in the West, the political atmosphere of insecurity spawned religious radicalism and made more and more people pay heed to preachers announcing the approaching doom. L. Ron Hubbard devised and marketed a new religion, the Church of Scientology; Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s postmodernist novels Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle and Slapstick also describe new religious systems. Philip K. Dick, in turn, presented religions of his own making, Mercerism, and belief in the Four Manifestations of God, in the short story “The Little Black Box” and novels Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Maze of Death. This essay compares these religions in order to show how they take advantage of human fear and anxiety and what they offer to their followers.
* Fear of the Inside: Neurology as a Science of Sensation in Victorian Literature.
Despite the attempts undertaken by nineteenth-century psychologists, philosophers and physiologists to define “sensation,” the latter remained a conspicuously fluid notion. This indefiteness provided a vast hermeneutic space for writers seeking new rhetorical devices to convey the complexity of human nature. This essay examines a variety of diverse accounts of “sensation” in Victorian fiction, discusses their functions and approaches to the mind-body relationship.
* The Black Atlantic Zombie: National Schisms and Utopian Diasporas in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker.
* Fears and Fictions of Samuel Beckett.
* Deeper Darkness: Fear of the Dionysian Ultimate in H.P. Lovecraft.
H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of terror strike at key questions of human existence – specifially, the origins of fear. Creating narratives that invoke and capitalize on Nietzsche’s fear of the advent of nihilism, Lovecraft drafted a world that was alternately mysterious and terrifying, and also coldly rooted in the scientific determinism that was at the core of his materialist atheism. In doing so, he uproots Nietzsche’s hope for man to transcend beyond the “death of God” and the subsequent nihilistic retreat into outmoded religious ideas.
* Mr. Turner’s Fears and Fantasies: The Turner Diaries and White Fear in America.
* Gender Implications of Literary Representations of Anxieties about Modernisation in Turkey: Aganta, Burina, Burinata (1945)