Category Archives: Scholarly works

Friday the 13th: plague in Providence

12 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Friday the 13th approaches. Here in the UK, the 13th is a key virus infection-point. According to the UK’s Chief Medical officer the start of the peak in symptoms should then begin here on 19th-23rd March, rising thereafter and possibly continuing high for three or four weeks. (Update: he’s now saying “the peak” might last 10-14 weeks).

Thus, tomorrow we face a very scary Friday the 13th. There’s also a full moon in the night sky, possibly giving hysterical toilet-roll chewers an added dose of lunacy.

What better reading then, for this moment, than my account of H.P. Lovecraft and the deadly influenza epidemic? Accordingly here is a free chapter from my book Lovecraft in Historical Context #3, “A Real Horror: on the 1918 flu epidemic in Providence”. The chapter has been slightly revised, and there’s a new picture of one of the armed guards on the gates of Brown University.

Download: real_horror_1918_flu_in_providence.pdf

Lovecraft Annual on JSTOR

12 Thursday Mar 2020

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The Lovecraft Annual is now on JSTOR, as the full run. Reviews are fully separated and itemised by book title, as are the Briefly Noted paragraphs. JSTOR is a sort of ‘all you can eat buffet’ of a list of selected journals, which most academic libraries give their students and full-time staff free access to. Inclusion is a mark of high quality, and should help boost citations for those for whom such things matter. Those who have been quietly scourged in the book reviews may not be quite so happy.

As for me, I’m only two issues away from having a complete set in paper, needing only 2008 and 2010.

Update: I just remembered that JSTOR do offer limited access to off-site independent researchers. It seems this scheme is still in operation, though when last heard of it was limited to selected journal titles only.

New book: Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture

11 Wednesday Mar 2020

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Theofantastique notices a new book-length survey from an academic, Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture…

a comprehensive tour of monsters on film and television, from the much-loved creations of Ray Harryhausen in Clash of the Titans to the monster of the week in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, before looking in detail at the afterlives of the Medusa and the Minotaur.

Also, the latest French open-access journal Leaves No. 9 is a special themed issue on the afterlife of Shelley’s Frankenstein in comics and sci-fi, etc. All in French, but since it’s open-access a translator-bot is only a click away.

New book: His Own Most Fantastic Creation

10 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraft as character, Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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I don’t usually cover anthology slabs here at Tentaclii, but I’ll make an exception for a fun one that features Lovecraft as a character, edited by the venerable S.T. Joshi. His Own Most Fantastic Creation is a £25 (about $40) hardcover from PS Publishing, and is pre-ordering now for shipping in April 2020.

The blurb is usefully descriptive…

Darrell Schweitzer focuses on Lovecraft’s childhood, when he was plagued with dreams of “night-gaunts” and was left bereft by the early death of his father. John Shirley depicts Lovecraft as a gawky teenager evolving his notions of “cosmicism”, while Scott Wiley emphasises Lovecraft’s devotion to cats. Stephen Woodworth and Donald R. Burleson ring changes on the Lovecraftian theme of personality exchange. Lovecraft famously collaborated with Harry Houdini on a story. Donald Tyson and Jonathan Thomas write very different stories on the association of these two figures. Mark Samuels focuses on Lovecraft’s creation of imaginary tomes of forbidden lore, while the stories by Richard Gavin, David Hambling, Jason V. Brock, and S. T. Joshi supply broader ruminations on the origins of Lovecraft’s revolutionary motifs. While eschewing Lovecraft himself as a character, the tales by W. H. Pugmire and Simon Strantzas exhibit figures who reveal strikingly Lovecraftian elements while probing the psyche of the man from Providence.

Super. It’s perhaps a pity that there’s not also an essay comprehensively surveying the uses of Lovecraft-as-character and Lovecraft-alikes in fiction, comics and poetry up to about 1969. Perhaps also appending the 1970-2020 titles in a simple checklist form. But I guess that might belong in a companion volume collecting such early stories and poems. However, Joshi does mention just a few of them in his short introduction…

Lovecraft the man has served as an inspiration for fiction writers as early as Edith Miniter (“Falco Ossifracus’ 1921), Frank Belknap Long (“The Space-Eaters’ 1928), and Robert Bloch (“The Shambler from the Stars:’ 1935) in his own day”.

“Traumas et conflits symboliques dans l’oeuvre de Robert E. Howard”

07 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by in REH, Scholarly works

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Patrice Louinet, Traumas et conflits symboliques dans l’oeuvre de Robert E. Howard (“Traumas and Symbolic Conflicts in the Work of Robert E. Howard”), a PhD thesis in French for the Sorbonne. Successfully defended 22nd November 2019, and now with a new record page online with English abstract…

“This study explores the fiction of Robert E. Howard [and] calls into question what is seen as the purely escapist nature of his tales and challenge the notion that his fiction is representative of the sub-genre he is considered to have initiated. [The thesis presents] the theory that Howard’s fiction is escapist only in the sense that it avoids writing about a traumatic episode dating from the author’s childhood. Focusing at first on apparently inconsequential details such as the characters’ names or the colour of their eyes, the present work identifies the literary traces and manifestations of the trauma we postulate, to reveal an elaborate, if hidden, architecture that informs the entire body of his fiction. This, in turn, offers new perspectives on Howard’s contribution to American fantasy and leads us to conclude that the very form of the genre proceeds from trauma.”

Three more volumes of Lovecraft letters

05 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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In February I missed noticing an update of S.T. Joshi’s blog. (The perils of having no RSS feed on one’s blog, hem hem…) His latest post reveals a new expanded edition of Barlow’s Eyes of the God is being prepared, this being the collected works other than the later ethnographic material…

enormously expanded editions of our previous editions of the writings of Loveman (Out of the Immortal Night) and R. H. Barlow’s Eyes of the God … the Barlow book will probably appear late this year or early next.

It’ll be interesting to see how it’s expanded. Has new material been found, I wonder? I see on Amazon that there’s also set to be a reprint of Barlow’s zines The Dragon-Fly and Leaves in collected book form in 2020.

S.T.’s blog also has news on the ever-growing set of annotated volumes of Lovecraft’s letters…

Letters to Alfred Galpin and Others (including letters to Edward H. Cole, Adolphe de Castro, and John T. Dunn) is imminent. Within the next few months we will release the enormous Letters to Family and Family Friends, probably in a two-volume paperback edition of about 600 pages each. This will be one of the most remarkable volumes in the series, containing his complete letters to his aunts, covering his critical New York years (1924–26) but also his extensive travels in the later 1920s. A volume of Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner and Others (also containing letters to Arthur Harris, Winifred V. Jackson, and others) is also in the offing.

Super. I shall have to start saving up $90 or so for the vital Family and Family Friends door-stoppers then, hopefully to arrive here for Autumn/Fall reading.

Dimensione Cosmica #9

03 Tuesday Mar 2020

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A new issue of the Italian journal Dimensione Cosmica n. 9, January 2020. My translation of the items in the table-of-contents that don’t appear to be fiction…

Fantastic realism and sense of the sacred.
Beorhtnoth and The Battle of Maldon.
Correspondence.
H. P. Lovecraft: a translation of “The Ancient Track”.
Libraries and initiatory secrets.
The triumph of the fantastic at Lucca Comics & Games 2019.
Stranger Things – strange things happen in Hawkins.
The Library of Elsewhere (book reviews).

Call: 2020 Pulpster

28 Friday Feb 2020

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The 2020 issue of the PulpFest’s annual journal The Pulpster is seeking articles. The lead theme for 2020 is “Ray Bradbury”, but the editors state they already have enough articles in-hand about his life and work.

If you have a proposal for an article, please contact editor Bill Lampkin. Articles and artwork must be submitted by the end of April. Bill can be reached at bill@thepulpster.com.

For advertising, please contact PulpFest marketing and programming director and THE PULPSTER publisher Mike Chomko at mike@pulpfest.com.

Added to Open Lovecraft

28 Friday Feb 2020

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Added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog…

* J. E. Stephens, “The Expert as Character in the Work of Le Fanu and Lovecraft: Spirituality, Empiricism, and Rationality”, B.A. degree dissertation for the University of Arizona, December 2019.

* G. Harman, “Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl”, Philosophy, Ethics, Religious Studies, #5, 2019. (In Russian. Drawing on and presenting in Russian some of the Lovecraftian ideas of Graham Harman, relating to Lovecraft, the object and its ‘objectivity’. Appears to be a translation of a text by Harman?)

And not yet on the page, but set for release to open access in December 2020, “The Geography of Horror: Lovecraft’s (Re)construction of New England”.

Call: Papers on the Fantastic

26 Wednesday Feb 2020

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The Northeast Alliance for Scholarship on the Fantastic and the Allied Fantastic Areas (NAS-FAFA?) is calling for papers for a conference at Southern New Hampshire University, in October 2020. Deadline: 1st June 2020. The venue is said to be “two hours from Providence”, by American reckoning of such things.

1) Specifically they want new papers that highlight ‘Wonder and the Marvellous’…

the more positive aspects of the fantastic genre … texts that bring about a sense of wonder in their receivers through their representation of the marvellous

Which seems to fit Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales, and opens the door for a rare appreciation of tales such as “Iranon”, “The Cats of Ulthar”, and even “Hypnos”, or a survey of the quite extensive influence of his Dreamlands in rock music and comics from circa 1966-1986. “Hypnos”, especially, has been curiously neglected by critics. For instance, neither Joshi or Klinger have annotated it despite its rich vein of references and allusions. But I have an annotated version about 70% done, which will fill that gap, and which may perhaps be released for Lovecraft’s 2020 birthday.

2) The other part of the call is for ‘Monsters & the Monstrous’. But specifically papers on the scariness of such things, and how in devising such scariness an artist can draw on other traditions…

the things, whether mundane or marvelous, that scare us [discussed in papers which offer] fresh explorations into [how creatives have drawn on and transformed] texts from various countries, time periods, and media.

Which may offer some possibilities for paper on Lovecraft’s uses of the Classical tradition, and Lovecraft’s creative transformation of his fear of seeing the tradition’s dissolution in the face of modernity.

“I hope it will not make it utterly un-decipherable to you…”

20 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Some of Lovecraft’s best poetry, now ably translated into Spanish. The leading Spanish newspaper El Pais has a review of the new volume.

Lovecraft is a prophet of human insignificance in the cosmos, yet Garcia Roman finally decides that one of the tonal keys to Lovecraft’s poetry is that… “The poems show an author of maturity. One who is less pessimistic … If Lovecraft opened any doors to hope, he did so in his verses.”