Geek Anthropologist is looking for contributors for texts ranging from “comprehensive pieces to book reviews”…

The Geek Anthropologist is a blog where geek culture and all things geek are analysed through the perspective of socio-cultural anthropology. We write about the intersections between social science, cultural analysis and practice of anthropology with geek culture, whether they be embodied, literary, cinematic or cybernetic. In short, we’re interested in any culturally informed analysis of geek culture or things that geeks love.

The Arkham Gazette is calling for article writers…

* A write-up of [the Lovecraft fragment] “Of Evill Sorceries Done in New-England of Daemons in no Human Shape” [found in Collected Essays V]

* Alchemy in New England [a vast subject, very active in terms of recent scholarship].

* A [linguistic and folkloric] discussion of what colonial witches might call various Mythos beings.

* New England folklore about witches.

* 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.