Added to Open Lovecraft…

* Philip Emery, “Revivifying the Ur-text: a reconstruction of sword-&-sorcery as a literary form”, PhD thesis at Loughborough University, UK, 2018. (The author is a North Staffordshire writer, of several horror novels. Here he 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”. Explores the structural development of the Ur-genre as it emerged in the stories of R.E. Howard (influenced by Lovecraft in terms of the horror elements), then surveys de Camp’s later contributions and distortions, and generally seeks to identify the “pristine elements” at the core of the genre’s once-flourishing form which are still available to creative writers).