* Francesco Levato (2014), “Semi-peripheral : spaces of deviation, abjection, madness”, New Academia, Vol.3 No.1, January 2014. (A ‘performative writing’ text, blending fragments of critical theory with bits from “The Call of Cthulhu”)

* Anthony Conrad Chieffalo (2011), “Poe, Lovecraft, and the uncanny: the horror of the self” (Masters dissertation for Central Connecticut State University. Uses Freud to suggest that Poe and Lovecraft draw on… “internal confrontations between the protagonists and the formerly concealed aspects of themselves” to make their stories into powerful horror).

Possibly useful, for some. A keyword search facility for the first edition of The Ancient Track (Lovecraft’s collected poems). Though it doesn’t even give you snippets in the search results, just page numbers where the keyword occurs.

* Jason Carney (2014), The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection (Ph.D thesis for Case Western. Explores the extent to which the best writing in Weird Tales aligns with the canonical accounts of modernism, as given by the early theorists of the movement. The most ambitious of the Weird Tales authors wove new modernist approaches into conventional realism, and thus discovered ways to make ordinary phenomena seem weird)

* Jeffrey Michael Renye (2013), Panic on the British Borderlands: The Great God Pan, Victorian Sexuality, and Sacred Space in the Works of Arthur Machen (Ph.D thesis for Temple University, Philadelphia. Identifies Lovecraft as the first critical writer on Machen)

* Eleanor Toland (2014), “And Did Those Hooves: Pan and the Edwardians” (Masters dissertation for the University of Wellington, NZ. Surveys the curiously British mythos that various authors together evolved around Pan in Edwardian Britain. Sees the Pan mythos as ending with the advent of the First World War, and does not consider the later reception of the Pan stories or the example they gave of the rapid development of a new mythos from many hands)

Bobby Dee has a new “An Open Letter on Studies in Weird Fiction” essay, at Wikithulhu. Including a useful discussion of what he calls “zombie ideas”, also known as received wisdom or outright myths, for example that ‘Lovecraft had syphilis’ or that he was ‘involved in the occult’.

He also suggests the need for a better framing and subtle contextualising of research questions, something which is all the more useful for those hefting a big axe they intend to grind on Lovecraft’s gravestone (‘Lovecraft was a racist, woman-hater, bad writer, disliked puppy dogs, etc’)…

“[on the ‘he hated women’ accusation]…how did Lovecraft’s depiction of women compare to those of his peers? Certainly Lovecraft handled women differently than Dashiell Hammet or Ernest Hemingway, but how does Lovecraft’s use of female characters stack up compared to Seabury Quinn [the star name of Weird Tales, at the time], or his fellow masters of the weird Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith? … [then it would] perhaps [be] worth retreading some [of that] old ground

I might have added an extra paragraph about the need to discover the wider historical context of one’s research question, and also to take into account a previous researcher’s apparent biases, most often inculcated by the historical era in which they were raised and trained. But sometimes also by their personal idiosyncrasies, such as L. Sprauge de Camp’s blockheaded inability to detect when Lovecraft was joking and joshing or running into self-parodic hyperbole in his letters, which was frequently.

As for “weird fiction” as a term, I can add that — contrary to opinion in the blathersphere and academia — Lovecraft did not purloin the term from Le Fanu.

* Alyssa Arbuckle (2014), “Considering “The Waste Land” for iPad and Weird Fiction as models for the public digital edition”, Digital Studies, 2014. (Compares “The Waste Land” for iPad with “the author’s own attempt at developing a digital literary application (Weird Fiction)”).

* Jose Eduardo Serrato Cordova (2013), “El imaginario gotico en dos autores Mexicanos: Emiliano Gonzalez y Ernesto de la Pena”, Revista Isla Flotante, Vol.V, No.5, 2013, pp.27-44. (In Spanish. Discusses… “the reception of the gothic in Mexico, via Emiliano Gonzalez and Ernesto de la Pena … The first of whom adapted for the Mexican reader the fantasy literature style of H.P. Lovecraft”).

* Fernando Dario Gonzalez Grueso (2007), “Buddai: el gigante dormido Australiano de Lovecraft”, Culturas Populares, No.4, 2007. (In Spanish. Compares the motifs and themes of certain folklore, with those employed by Lovecraft. Specific reference to “The Shadow Out of Time”, re: aboriginal oral legend and myths of the sleeping giant, frightening winds, the sinister moon, fields of stones, and ancient footprints once left by giants of the Dreamtime).

I had a chance to look at Angela Carter’s 1975 essay on Lovecraft, “The Hidden Child”, written for the UK’s leftist New Society weekly magazine. It has an interesting dynamism and pungency that I don’t often read now, except in the likes of Mark Steyn or Jonathan Meades at their best. She was of the brisk and blunt generation that came of age via the British underground press, and which was perhaps best exemplified by Swells & Co. and others writing in the NME at its 1975-1984 height. One fragment is almost a story…

He adored erudition, like the Argentinian Borges, to whom he has an odd stylistic resemblance. But he took the easy way out and invented all his own references. So his work provides all the appearance of pedantry but none at all of the substance. He devised whole libraries of books to validate his mythologies. They have the most wonderful titles. The Pnakotic Manuscripts. The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. The “delirious” Image du monde of Gauthier de Metz. The suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kitlten of von Junzt.

One could write a very Lovecrafty tale about the arrival at his door late, very late, one night of a (preferably) demented student clutching in his hand an actual copy of the dreaded Necronomicom of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, bound in human skin, stolen from the enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale and brought triumphantly to the Maestro of the Twisted Nerve, who has so often mentioned it.

Shocked horror of the master, who never thought the vile thing existed. Has he thought the abomination into existence? Or did it always exist, has he always been unconsciously quoting it? Opening the pages with trembling fingers, he discovers cryptic marginalia on the time-seared pages, penned what centuries ago in what fearful city yet, unmistakably, in his own handwriting.

Carter also attempts a little pop psychoanalysis with Lovecraft. Psychoanalysis was all the rage in the mid 70s, as the disillusioned flower-children among the British literati turned inward, their revolutions seemingly defeated and trodden into the mire of a socialist Britain. Lovecraft she deems a perpetual boy, seeking his way back to boyhood, but rather to …

The beastly world of childhood, with its polymorphously perverse imaginings; its wild, inconsolable fears; its terror of darkness, of loneliness, its hatred of strangers. Its love of long, strange words and facility for inventing private languages. Its ability to construct elaborate mythologies out of the cracks in the crazy paving or the patterns on the wallpaper. Fear of cold. Weakness. Clawing, screaming temper tantrums. Self-abuse, old wives’ tales.

She may not be far wrong in that. But then it seems to me she perhaps projects something of the bubbling and festering violence of mid 1970s urban England onto Lovecraft, and also foreshadows the feminist turn toward seeing ultra-violence lurking around every phallus. She deems the lack of surface sexuality in the stories to be masking…

a strong sado-masochistic element. Carnage, ghouls, cannibalism. Ravages of “demon claws and teeth”; corpses “mangled, chewed and clawed”. … Is it any wonder, when evil finally manifests itself, that it does so as an obscene and huge ejaculation? [pus, slime, surgings, bubblings, etc]