{"id":20565,"date":"2018-12-04T05:46:59","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T02:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=20565"},"modified":"2018-12-04T05:46:59","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T02:46:59","slug":"holy-monsters-sacred-grotesques","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2018\/12\/04\/holy-monsters-sacred-grotesques\/","title":{"rendered":"Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new book Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States<\/a><\/em> is one of those elite $115 essay collections seemingly aimed at collecting dust in University and (in this case) ecclesiastical libraries. <\/p>\n

I’ve only just noticed it, and see that it appeared in the summer of 2018. It’s only of interest here for the one chapter: “Lovecraft\u2019s Things: Sinister Souvenirs from Other Worlds” by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Curiously an essay of the same title, and by the same author, also appeared in the similar (though now rather less costly) book collection The Age of Lovecraft<\/a><\/em> (2016), so the 2018 essay seems to be a reprint — though I suppose it could also be revised and\/or expanded version.<\/p>\n

For those wondering what’s in that essay, since the new book has no previews as yet… after introductory and theoretical ‘thing theory’ sections, the final third of Weinstock’s Age of Lovecraft<\/a><\/em> essay surveyed Lovecraft’s re-use of the stock Gothic props of the Castle (“Rats”), the Portrait (“Pickman”), and the Forbidden Book (guess), especially in terms of their uncanny quasi-personification in Lovecraft’s texts. It is suggested that such a form of personification might raise in Lovecraft’s readers a dimly resonant recall of a superstitious world, a world in which liminal objects and object-places (such as castles) had once been psychologically ‘enchanted’ with both dread and wonder. Such personification of earthly ‘things’ might also be understood as foreshadowing Lovecraft’s later deployment of monstrous cosmic forces in his fiction, outer entities that indifferently understand humans only as ‘things’. (The essay somewhat feeds into academic theory’s current notions of trans-species psychology, a future eco-animism, and a post-human planet).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new book Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States is one of those …<\/p>\n

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