Another quick trawl for recent Lovecraft scholarship published in out-of-the-way places…

* Micheal Gentry. “Parser at the Threshold: Lovecraftian horror in interactive fiction“. In the book: IF Theory Reader, March 2011. (Online, free.)

Also related to IF (interactive fiction), an English summary of a talk given at the Storyworlds Across Media conference (Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz, 30th June — 2nd July 2011)…

“In a talk on “The Developing Storyworld of H.P. Lovecraft”, Van Leavenworth (Umea) demonstrated that Lovecraft’s works hold two mythical concepts that appeal to his followers who have not only developed a number of textual, audio-visual and interactive fictions but also integrated elements of his stories into obscure cults: the loss of control or ‘cosmic fear’ and humanity’s inability to understand cosmic knowledge. Apparently, these universal human concerns adapt well to different uses and invite recipients to engage in the spiritual and transcendent body of thought that is attributed to the author’s name and persona. Hence, Leavenworth, as the previous speakers, put Ryan’s criteria of consistency and media-exclusiveness of the storyworld up for debate.”

* David Marks (2011). From the will to Wessex to Arkham: Lovecraft’s geophilosophical debt to Hardy. California State University, M.A. dissertation. (Hardy as in Thomas Hardy. Not yet online.)

* Julio Franca (Oct 2011). “Fundamentos Esteticos da Literatura de Horror: A influencia de Edmund Burke sobre H. P. Lovecraft“. (Article in Spanish on the influence of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, on Lovecraft. Online.)

* Matthew Strohack (2011). “The City under the Hill: Allegorical Tradition and H. P. Lovecraft’s America.” A chapter in the book American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey, SUNY Press, December 2011. (Already available to read online at Google Books.)

Forthcoming in the second issue of The Heretic’s Torch print zine…

“[a] lengthy interview with […] S.T. Joshi (the Lovecraft scholar)”

“a [heavy] metal-adapted version of Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature essay discussing weird fiction in [heavy] metal [music]”

An interesting new empirical / industry-structure analysis of the rise of SF in America: David Reinecke, “From the Pulps to the Stars: The Making of the American Science Fiction Magazine, 1923-1973”. Princeton University CACPS Working Paper #44, Fall 2011.

The New York Times obituary for Les Daniels — horror author of Providence, and “one of the earliest historians of comic books” with books such as Comix: A History of Comic Books In America (1971).

Also… “The subject of his master’s thesis was the horror author H.P. Lovecraft” and he wrote on Lovecraft for the local Providence press. It seems S.T. Joshi has a section on the Daniels vampire novels, in the book The Evolution of the Weird Tale. Joshi also suggests, in one interview, that Daniels’s Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (1975)… “is probably the best we have, but of course it is very much out of date”.

Some new open dissertations/theses:

From 2010, The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic (doesn’t address Lovecraft in any substantial way, but may be conceptually useful to some).

From August 2011, Radical Realms: A Materialist Theory of Fantasy Literature (undergraduate)

Also noted while searching, though either not online or behind a paywall…

* Smith, P. (2011), “Re-visioning Romantic-Era Gothicism: An Introduction to Key Works and Themes in the Study of H.P. Lovecraft”. Literature Compass, 8 (Nov 2011), pages 830–839.

* Aaron Smuts, “Pickman’s Model”: Horror and the Objective Purport of Photographs”. Revue internationale de philosophie, 2010/4 (No. 254).

* David Farnell, “Unlikely Utopians: Ecotopian Dreaming in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’ and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood”, Arena Journal, issue 35-36 (2011)

* A Canadian 2010 M.A. disseration called “Spectres of Darwin: H.P. Lovecraft’s Nihilistic Parody of Religion”.