Due for publication from Palgrave in about five days, Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939.

The book is pitched as a wide-ranging study of how and where ‘the weird’ emerged from the Victorian supernatural tale, in a British context. Some theory, but it’s Bourdieu which is fine by me. It looks promising, though the price is set at a regrettable £79 (£57 with the introductory discount) — it’s yet another of those high-priced books aiming for sales to university libraries.

It appears to be concerned with policing the genres/canon and as such seems to be fairly author-centric — judging by the Springer abstracts of each chapter. There doesn’t appear to be a sustained wider consideration of the impact on authors and readers of things like: the re-discovery of folklore and the popularisation of folk tales; the re-discovering of the strangeness of ancient history; and the inspirations taken from the fringe pseudo-religions and cranky spiritualisms of the time.

If Chapter 5 is a sound and deeply researched historical study of the impact of Weird Tales in Britain, on both readers and authors, then that would be of great interest. Yet the materials with which to undertake that have probably now slipped from history, and the Palgrave abstract for Chapter 5 makes it appear rather less promising than that…

Here Machin [the book’s author] turns to what is regarded as both the culmination of the ‘high phase’ of weird fiction, and one of its definitive iterations: the 1920s and 1930s run of Weird Tales magazine. He specifically looks at this period of Weird Tales through the lens of his previous investigation of fin-de-siècle British weird fiction. Machin argues that, contrary to some claims, Weird Tales was part of an existing tradition and a continuation of fin-de-siècle literary Decadence in the age of Modernism. Underlying this discussion, and concluding a structural theme of the entire thesis, is a consideration of canonicity, and of the polluting of neat boundaries between notions of high and low culture.

Still, the book like a good and welcome survey, if set within fairly narrow bounds.

There’s yet another new reprint of Lovecraft stories. But this time it’s the British Library which is cashing in, with its hardcover The Gothic Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (Aug 2018). This is now available in the British Library shop, and also on Amazon albeit under a different title than that of the cover, “The Gothic Stories of H. P. Lovecraft”.

Since it’s from such a prestigious publisher, presumably they used the definitive corrected Joshi texts — but the blurb doesn’t mention or credit him. A keyword search of stjoshi.org for “British Library” or “Gothic Tales” or “Gothic Stories” shows no results. And you might have thought he would have mentioned it on his regular blog, if the British Library were about to use his texts.

There’s no “Look Inside” for the book on Amazon, so I can’t even tell what stories have been selected. Judging by the book’s blurb, the selection is of ‘the Gothic tales’ and seems intended to make Lovecraft slightly more palatable to those in Gothic Studies classrooms — a field of study which has previously been very sniffy about his work.