Category Archives: Scholarly works

Inventing the Egghead

14 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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Interesting new £30 history book, Inventing the Egghead: the battle over brainpower in American culture (University of Pennsylvania Press). It ranges from 1900 to the 1960s, and may shed some light on how Lovecraft’s intellectual pursuits would have been viewed in the culture, and how those views changed during his adulthood. Judging from the introduction on Google Books, plenty of attention is paid to popular culture, more than to the discussions of intellectuals in rarified political / elite / university circles.

Chapters 2 & 5 may provide notable historical and cultural context relevant to Lovecraft:

CONTENTS:

Introduction: Or, They Think We’re Stupid [on the recent denigration of George Bush, followed by an overview of the book]

1. “Aren’t We Educational Here Too?”: Brainpower and the Emergence of Mass Culture [Luna Park, Coney Island at the dawn of the 20th century]

2. The Force of Complicated Mathematics: Einstein Enters American Culture [post 1919]

3. Knowledge Is Power: Women, Workers’ Education, and Brainpower in the 1920s [working-class women and education]

4. “The Negro Genius”: Black Intellectual Workers in the Harlem Renaissance

5. “We Have Only Words Against”: Brainworkers and Books in the 1930s [impact of the Great Depression and the New Deal]

6. Dangerous Minds: Spectacles of Science in the Postwar Atomic City

7. Inventing the Egghead: Brainpower in Cold War American Culture

Epilogue

Sadly, there appears to be no audio book or Kindle edition, only a paper hardcover. Why do big publishers waste all the great publicity their initial reviews get, by not simultaneously producing the book in popular and accessible formats? Seriously, I mean a good Kindle edition is pretty easy and cheap to create once you have the book in a standard digital format, and an audio book for 280 pages of plain English is perhaps $1,500 of time from a jobbing actor with a home studio?

Famous Monsters of Filmland #267

08 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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The latest Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine reportedly has a special Lovecraft issue out. #267 has…

The Creation of Cthulhu by S.T. Joshi.
Lovecraft’s Acolytes by Robert M. Price.
The New Mythos Writers, a survey by S.T. Joshi.
+ “several more excellent articles about Lovecraft”.

Cthulhu-Cover-267_1024x1024

Currently going for about £10 on eBay, although you may have to settle for an alternative King Kong cover.

Steven J. Mariconda book

04 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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A new blog post by S.T. Joshi reveals another book of scholarly essays on Lovecraft, set for summer/autumn 2013 release…

“Steven J. Mariconda, has just submitted his expanded collection of essays on Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality, a solid book of more than 100,000 words which we will release by the NecronomiCon. [18th-20th October 2013]”

A Mariconda essay of the same title is in Lovecraft Studies (Fall 1993), so I’m guessing that the new book will collect all of Mariconda’s essays on Lovecraft?

New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft

22 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Found another new forthcoming book of essays on Lovecraft, coming in July 2013. This $70 anthology of essays “from a range of noted scholars, novelists and writers” is simply titled New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. It’s from mainstream publisher Palgrave Macmillan — who have saddled it not only with a hideous cover but also with the eyebrow-raising claim that it’s… “the first scholarly study of its kind”.

newc

New scholarly books on Lovecraft

22 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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A couple of forthcoming books of essays on Lovecraft, dated and with covers.

Dated May 2013, Lovecraft and Influence: his predecessors and successors. This is a 200 page hardback in the Studies in Supernatural Literature series, from Scarecrow Press…

“Chapters in this collection are devoted to authors whose work had an impact on Lovecraft — Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lord Dunsany — and those who drew inspiration from him, including William S. Burroughs, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti” and others.

linf

The first half of this sounds interesting, especially as it’s edited by Robert H. Waugh. I don’t think I’ve seen a really good analysis of the influence of the 18th century writers whom Lovecraft imbibed so heavily (although possibly Joshi has one somewhere, on at least the philosophical influences). I’d welcome a print or Kindle review-copy of this one.

The second is due June 2013, Gavin Callaghan’s H.P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia: the satire, symbology and contradiction is from the mainstream publisher McFarland…

“Gavin Callaghan goes back to the weird texts themselves, and follows where Lovecraft leads him: into an arcane world of parental giganticism and inverted classicism, in which Lovecraft’s parental obsessions were twisted into the all-powerful cosmic monsters of his imaginary cosmology.”

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This sounds horribly as though it may be Freudian in some form in its approach: “parental giganticism”? Let’s hope it doesn’t also fashionably suggest little Lovecraft as the subject of unwonted attentions behind the woodshed…

More Open Lovecraft

23 Saturday Feb 2013

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Added to the Open Lovecraft page…

* Jesse Norford (2012), “Pagan Death: Lovecraftian horror and the dream of decadence”, IN: Eoghain Hamilton (Ed.), The Gothic: probing the boundaries, Inter-disciplinary Press (Critical Issues Series), 2012.

* Stefano Lazzarin (2004), “Horreur, hyperbole et reticence chez Lovecraft”, Belphegor, Vol.3, No.2, April 2004. (In French. Title translates as “Horror, hyperbole and reticence in Lovecraft”).

* Francesco Toniolo (2012), “L’Anello di Cthulhu: Il mito religioso in Tolkien e Lovecraft”. (In Italian. Appears to be an undergraduate final disseration? Title translates as: “The Ring of Cthulhu: religious myth in Tolkien and Lovecraft”).

More Open Lovecraft

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

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Added to the Open Lovecraft page…

* David Ellis Morgan (2003), “Pulp literature: a re-evaluation”. (Ph.D. thesis for Murdoch University in Australia).

* Benjamin Noys (2008), “Horror Temporis”, Collapse, Vol.IV: “Concept Horror” (2008), pp.277-285. (Essay on Lovecraft’s conception of time).

* Miguel Angel Ardila Rodriguez (2009), “El horror cosmico de H.P. Lovecraft: una corriente estetica en la literatura de horror contemporanea” (Possibly a Masters dissertation, for the National University of Colombia? Title translates as: “The cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft: an aesthetic in contemporary horror literature”).