Category Archives: Scholarly works

Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection – shipping now

02 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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I’m pleased to say that my new book is now shipping. It contains revised, expanded, and footnoted versions of my recent Tentaclii essays. Some of the new discoveries include a macabre Lovecraft revision poem not included in the new edition of The Ancient Track; a probable new photo of Lovecraft at age 9; a major new source for Suydam in “Red Hook”; a disproving of the claim that the Necronomicon was inspired by Hawthorne’s Notebooks; and a new previously unknown but obvious source for the name Cthulhu.

Lovecraft in Historical Context: fifth collection.cover_front_600px

80,000 words of new scholarly essays on the author H.P. Lovecraft. 340 pages, as a perfect bound 6″ x 9″ paperback with colour covers. $20. Paypal accepted.

CONTENTS:

PART ONE: Topographies

1. The Catskill Mountains

   “A mighty woodcutter”: on the trail of Bernard Austin Dwyer.
   Two poems by Bernard Austin Dwyer, newly discovered.
   The annotated “The Lurking Fear”.

2. New York City

   Suydam revealed: a major new source for “The Horror at Red Hook”.
   Reds in New York: an aspect of Lovecraft’s New York circle in the 1930s.
   A note on the interior layout of 169 Clinton Street, Brooklyn.

3. Providence

   H.P. Lovecraft and his local Public Library.
   Found: a new photograph of the young H.P. Lovecraft?
   The Ward of 100 Prospect St.
   ‘Ancients and Horribles’: the grotesque parade tradition in Rhode Island.
   H.P. Lovecraft and the RISD Museum of Art, Providence
   H.P. Lovecraft among the Jews: a snapshot in time.
   Electro-quacks of Providence 1: Orville Livingston Leach.
   Electro-quacks of Providence 2: Dr. William F. Channing.
   H.P. Lovecraft’s star-charts.

4. Travels and places

   The location of “Juan Romero”: Area 52.
   The Isles of Shoals as a possible inspiration for Devil Reef.
   Locating the Sentinel Elm at Athol.
   A note on H.P. Lovecraft and Bolton, Mass.
   The Boston North End as H.P. Lovecraft saw it.
   On the trail to Dark Swamp.

PART TWO: Ancient secrets

   The extent of the influence of “The Horla” on H.P. Lovecraft.
   H.P. Lovecraft and Great Zimbabwe.
   Finding Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft and Chthetho.

PART THREE: Friends and correspondents

   Allan Grayson of New York: the young poet of Dunedin.
   Some new biographical details for Henry S. Whitehead, and four texts:
      Whitehead’s early biography, Harvard College Class of 1904 yearbook.
      Cures Mentally Sick by Prayer (interview), Boston Post, 1921.
      Editorial Prejudice Against The Occult (article), The Writer, 1922.
      Henry S. Whitehead (obituary), The Evening Independent, 1932.
   “Hell’s Turned Loose”: a ‘lost’ Lovecraft revision poem, found.
   ‘… Nor a Lender Be’: H.P. Lovecraft and Ernest La Touche Hancock.
   Some new biographical details for Albert August Sandusky.
   Some notes on Richard Ely Morse.
   A note on Gordon Hatfield, composer and stage director.
   A note on Edward Harold Cole.
   A note on the H.P. Lovecraft correspondent Albert Chapin.
   Samuel Loveman’s late and wayward hand.
   Anne Tillery Renshaw (c.1890?-c.1940?).

PART FOUR: Influence

   On Lovecraft’s glands.
   Did Lovecraft read Moby Dick?
   Hawthorne’s influence on the genesis of the Necronomicon.
   Lovecraft’s pocket nuclear device.
   A note on Lovecraft and Terence McKenna.

Book review: Lovecraft and Influence: his predecessors and successors.

Three additions and corrections for essays from previous volumes.

POEM: “The Harbour”

Buy it here.

A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos – revised paperback

23 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Newly arrived on Amazon, the revised paperback of A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the Cthulhu Mythos, for $17.99. Seems to be print-on-demand (CreateSpace), so is presumbly not going to go out-of-print. Although scholars may still prefer the first edition, since Don Herron writes of the second edition that he persuaded Haefele into…

dropping much of the academic apparatus he had in the hardback version — page numbers for quotes in the text and all that needless crap

So I suppose the first edition is still the one that scholars will want, errors and all, since at least it has the “needless crap” that means that all the quotes can actually be tracked back to a source page. Do any readers know if Haefele ever issued erratum pages for his first edition?

Haefele-revamp

Some forthcoming conferences in 2015

21 Sunday Sep 2014

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Some academic conferences already announced for 2015, of relevance to H.P. Lovecraft…

* Gothic Spaces: Boundaries, Mergence, Liminalities, 21st-22nd January 2015, Sydney, Australia.

   “the meaning and impact of Gothic spaces not only in aesthetic terms, but also the physical, psychological, and the cultural”

* Monstrous Geographies: places and spaces of monstrosity, 22nd-24th March 2015, Lisbon, Portugal.

   “the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic”

* 2nd Global Conference on Letters and Letter Writing, 22nd-24th March 2015, Lisbon, Portugal.

    Very broad, seems to be open to anything on letters and correspondence circles.

* “The Once and Future Antiquity: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction and Fantasy” conference, Seattle, 27th-29th March 2015.

   “What roles has classical antiquity played in visions of the future, the fantastic, the speculative, the might-have-been?”

* Enchanted Edwardians, 30th-31st March 2015, Bristol, England.

   “…the ways in which the [British] Edwardians understood and employed the idea of the enchanted, the haunted and the supernatural.”

* Local Color Outside the Lines: American Literary Regionalism’s ‘Others’ (Northeast Modern Literature Assoc.), 30th April 2015, Toronto, Canada.

   “This panel seeks papers that address [USA] literary regionalism’s ‘others’ construed narrowly or broadly”.

The Once and Future Antiquity

19 Friday Sep 2014

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“The Once and Future Antiquity: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction and Fantasy” conference, Seattle, 27th-29th March 2015.

“What roles has classical antiquity played in visions of the future, the fantastic, the speculative, the might-have-been?”

Given Lovecraft’s abundant uses of classical antiquity in his fiction and poetry, I’d be surprised if the organisers can’t squeeze in at least one Lovecraft paper.

Atlantis and the pulps

16 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works

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A clearly-delivered 30-minute video lecture on the influence of the myth of Atlantis on R.E. Howard, by pulp history scholar Jeff Shanks. Including discussion of the Atlantis fringe authors, who Lovecraft eventually got around to reading circa the mid to late 1920s.

Lovecraft had of course written an early Atlantis story in “The Temple” (1920), in which the Prussian narrator suggests the sunken city was the forerunner of Ancient Greece.

He commented to Clark Ashton Smith in June 1926 about his reading of The Story of Atlantis (1896)…

[he writes that he is undertaking new reading] of vast interest as background or source material — which has belatedly introduced me to a cycle of myth as developed by modern occultists and sophical charlatans … I only wish I could get hold of more of the stuff. What I have read is The Story of Atlantis [1896]… by W. Scott Elliott.

He then attempted the germ of an Atlantis-meets-Roman Britain story in his fragment “The Descendant” (c.1927)…

Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the raths and circles and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest.

But this would have rather improbably placed Atlantis somewhere just off his beloved ancestral Cornwall and Devon. One suspects that even Lovecraft balked at the task of turning the homely Isles of Scilly into the evil-haunted remnant mountain-tops of a sunken Atlantis.