{"id":18915,"date":"2018-10-28T08:07:26","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T05:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=18915"},"modified":"2018-10-28T08:07:26","modified_gmt":"2018-10-28T05:07:26","slug":"the-decline-of-the-west-on-kindle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2018\/10\/28\/the-decline-of-the-west-on-kindle\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Decline of the West’ on Kindle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I see that S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West<\/a><\/em> was made available as a Kindle ebook since the end of summer 2018, and now sports a very reasonable pocket-money price.<\/p>\n

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It’s the fullest account of ‘Lovecraft the philosopher’ and his wide range of influences in that field. Also the influence on him of what might be called ‘the phantasm of decline’ — that strangely popular but nebulous apparition that haunts gloomy intellectuals, and which leads them to believe that civilisational collapse is forever just around the corner. (As a corrective, see heavyweight books such as: Ridley’s The Rational Optimist<\/em>; Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals<\/em>; Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History<\/em>, and my ongoing 2020 blog<\/a>). Perhaps also Staring Into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization<\/em>; and The Perennial Apocalypse: How the End of the World Shapes History<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Joshi writes clearly and precisely as usual, and the book is usefully untainted by airy academic genuflections toward the latest idols of literary-political theory. The Decline of the West<\/em> was previously available as an oversize paperback, which has a two-column layout — which some may prefer for the task of ploughing through dense philosophical triangulations. On the other hand, the ebook is keyword-searchable, which means that Lovecraft scholars may want to own both editions — though you may chuckle at such a heavyweight ebook having a toy-like ‘stop-motion Cthulhu’ on the front cover. Such are the demands of trigger-finger ebook marketing today, I suppose — ‘no monster, no sales’.<\/p>\n

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Purchasers will also want to have on their Kindle the texts available from my 2014 blog post Lovecraft as Philosopher<\/a>, these being a sniffy review of Decline of the West<\/em> and Joshi’s magisterial demolition of the review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I see that S. T. Joshi’s H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West was made available as a Kindle …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,18,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-context","category-new-books","category-scholarly-works"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}