The call is out for the 2012 Jamie Bishop Memorial Award, for a critical essay on the fantastic. 3,000-10,000 words, deadline 1st September 2012.

Mention of an interesting-sounding academic paper, presented last month at the Queertopia! queer studies conference in northwest Australia…

Alexandra Edwards, “Like some monstrous stealthy cat”: queerness and felinomorphism in Charles Brockden Brown, Henry James, and H.P. Lovecraft.

Edwards won the English Department’s Best Graduate Essay prize with the paper, but sadly it’s not online. The term “felinomorphism” appears to come via the parody Ground Zero by Paul Lysymy, which makes me think the paper might be also in that line(?).

Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous: future anxieties. 10th-12th September 2012 at Mansfield College, Oxford, in the UK.

Themes:

* Monstrous Places/Spaces of the Future

* Human Monsters

* Monstrous Aliens & Alien Invaders

* Monstrous Generations (youth, old folks etc)

* Monstrous Politics (which predictably avoids suggesting the horrors of socialism)

News of an upcoming academic conference (or perhaps a conference strand?) on Lovecraft, to be held in Vermont — Weird Lovecraft: H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, and the American Horror Canon…

“The College of St. Joseph is actively looking for paper proposals that explore the way that Lovecraft and/or Weird Tales helped construct the American horror canon or the American horrific aesthetic.”

“Papers will be presented at the College of St. Joseph’s popular culture conference, held 26-27th October 2012.”

See the PDF for details. Sadly, I see that the deadline for abstacts has passed — it was 15th May. Better initial publicity needed, next time, methinks.

Open access to The Bookman USA (1895-1933) and The Bookman UK (1891-1934).

Search via Google:

site:http://www.unz.org/Pub/Bookman keyword

Also quite a few pulps from the 1940s and 1950s, including Fantastic Novels and Fantastic Adventures and some later Weird Tales, which have Lovecraft reprints.

You can also search the entire archive via:

site:http://www.unz.org/Pub/ Lovecraft

A new conference on the monstrous. 1st Global Conference on Monstrous Geographies: places and spaces of monstrosity. 18th – 20th July 2012, University of Oxford, UK…

“What is the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic – those places monsters inhabit, but also places that are configured as being monstrous in and of themselves?”

Interesting. Sadly the deadline for papers has long passed, or I might have submitted something cut from my most recent book on Lovecraft and New York City. It looks like it would cost me about £500 to attend. If a kind benefactor would care to donate that amount, I can guarantee a substantial plain English 6,000+ word report soon after the event.

Chris Fitter (1997). “The Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre“, Early Modern Literary Studies 3.2 (September, 1997). Available in full, for free. An interesting scholarly academic survey of the history of night walk in literature, from classical times to the early modern period (1600s). Possibly relevant to understanding Lovecraft’s attraction to, and his understand of, the night walk as a literary practice. It may also be of interest to historical/horror novelists researching the practice.

It’s behind a paywall, but this new academic article might interest…

Robinson, Christopher L. (2012)   “The Stuff of Which Names are Made: A Look at the Colorful and Eclectic Namecraft of Lord Dunsany”.   Names: A Journal of Onomastics.  Volume 60, Number 1, March 2012, pages 26-35.

“Lord Dunsany’s prolific namecraft provides a rich field for study, but poses difficulties for traditional approaches to names in literature, which typically seek out the hidden meanings or symbolisms of isolated names. An alternative approach is to look for trends in the forms and substances of the author’s inventions as a whole. To this end, Emile Souriau’s threefold typology of neologisms proves useful. In the first category, Dunsany camouflages pre-existing vocables of diverse origins. In the second, he employs anglicized versions of forms identified with foreign languages and nomenclatures, though he does not introduce actual foreign sounds. In the third, he constructs names from morphological building blocks. Whether English or foreign, Dunsany divests his source materials of their original referents, yet retains traces of their idiomatic provenance. Colorful and eclectic, his inventions resonate within a mythopoetic encyclopedia of diverse literary, historical, and cultural traditions.”

A seemingly new (Nov 2011) short scholarly paper, in French. Reflets de villes dans le désert : de Lovecraft a Borges (“Reflections of cities in the desert: Lovecraft to Borges”)…

“There is a traditional conception of the fantastic city. It rises in the Gothic novel, and has been perpetuated in the modern horror, imposing an urban topography across two or three levels — articulated as a social reality, a visceral fear, and as a symbolic expression.”