Bare.Bones #7 (Summer 2021) is now available and has a non-fiction lead article which may interest some… “The Stuart Gordon H.P. Lovecraft Adaptations” by Matthew R. Bradley.

Iris, a long-running French journal… “to promote and to disseminate research in the field of myths, images, symbols and cultural history.” Tested articles were all open access, had English abstracts, and were under Creative Commons Attribution NC.

Taiwan’s Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (appears to be free online) invites contributions to a special issue on Asian Gothic, scheduled to appear in December 2022. They seek “essays of 6,000-10,000 words to broaden our understanding of the Gothic in Asia”. Deadline for abstracts: 15th October 2021.

Suggested themes that may especially interest Lovecraftians:

* Gothic and Asian popular culture (manga, comics, anime, games, fashion, subcultures etc).
* Asian adaptations of western Gothic texts.
* Asian Gothic as part of a “globalgothic”.
* Genealogy of Gothic in an Asian context.

A 2019 call for papers is set to result in a new book on Lovecraft and his relatively recent adaptations (the original call was for the “1990s to the present day”). The publisher’s blurb now makes it sound like a politically-correct dust-gatherer for university libraries only, and so it obviously is… in part. But I’ve seen the table-of-contents and at least the first third of Lovecraft in the 21st Century seems of some interest to Lovecraftians, with items such as…

Lovecraft and the Stage: A Recent (Re)Discovery.

An Uncanny Absence: Lovecraft in Brazilian cinema, 1975-2016.

The Masks of E’ch-Pi-El: Interpreting the Life and Work of H.P. Lovecraft.

Man or Cartoon: H.P. Lovecraft as a Comics Character.

“It Was the Vegetation”: Ecophobia and Monstrous Wilderness in The Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.

The book looks set to ship in early 2022 from the profit-sharing anti-capitalist ebook collective HappyClappi at a reasonable £30. Nope, just kidding. It’s actually from corporate publisher Routledge, at a list price of £140 ($195).

New in Studies in the Fantastic… “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry” ($ paywall)…

Although alliterative poetry … first flourished in Old English and Old Norse literature, a resurgence of the meter appeared within the twentieth century. The most famous modern practitioners have been J.R.R. Tolkien, Ezra Pound, and W.H. Auden, but a wholly neglected subset of the alliterative revival involves American genre poets working in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. … Although this revival of alliterative metrics never reached the same “critical mass” of the fourteenth-century alliterative revival, it nonetheless shows how a non-professional antiquarian interest in medieval literature can foment a niche — yet surprisingly robust — body of genre poetry.

Open and seemingly new online, a run of the journal Cryptozoology (1982-1996), a journal of apparently scholarly articles on ‘yeti-hunting’ and suchlike. May be of interest to writers seeking to glean some obscure but well-grounded nugget of topographical inspiration on monster-matters.

Added to my Open Lovecraft page of open scholarly work.

* S. Hadalin, H.P. Lovecraft’s Symbols of Indifference: A Combined Critical Approach. (Dissertation for the University of Mariboru, Slovenia, 2021. In English.)

* S. Chattopadhyay, “Finding the Image of God: Searching the ‘Sublime’ through works of Rene Descartes and H.P Lovecraft”, International Journal of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Vol.2, No.4, 2021.

* A.F. dos Santos, “Passado glorioso, presente decadente: a fabricacao da Nova Inglaterra a partir do conto “The Street” de Lovecraft (1920)”, Temporalidades, 2021. (“Glorious Past, Decadent Present: The Making of New England in Lovecraft’s ‘The Street'”)

* A.O. Soshnikov, “Features of The Structural-semantic Organisation of ‘At The Mountains of Madness'”, World of Science, Culture, Education, 2021. (In Russian. Finds that the interpenetration of genres in the text enhances… “the role of the mystical component … which leads to the expansion of its semantic space and, ultimately, enhances the author’s unique style.”)

* N.S. Mohamed, A Construcao do Locus Horribilis nos Contos de H.P. Lovecraft (“The Construction of the Locus Horribilis in the Tales of H. P. Lovecraft”. Masters dissertation for the Universidade Estadual Paulista ‘Julio de Mesquita Filho’, Brazil. Uses three tales to explore how the combination of spatiality, ambience and atmosphere generates the ‘locus horribilis’ in horror narratives).

A new post today on Arthur C. Clarke and the Smithsonian, which reveals…

In 2015, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum Archives acquired the personal papers of famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke … Over the past year, I completed the task of scanning and digitally ingesting the correspondence series from this collection and now these materials are available to researchers via the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives.

Yes, tested just now… and the Clarke letters are now online and public.

From Lord Dunsany to Clarke.