The AGE of LOVECRAFT


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Just received this purchased book….
Edited by Carl H. Sederholm and  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Foreword by Ramsey Campbell
Featuring words from James Kneale, Isabella van Elferen, Brian Johnson, Jed Mayer, David Simmons, Jessica George, David Punter, W. Scott Poole, China Miéville.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS 2016
In due course, I shall comment on this book in the thought stream below.

15 thoughts on “The AGE of LOVECRAFT”



  2. I have just read the first six pages of the Introduction. Very satisfying fare. Highly textured with mind-awakening philosophy, even at this early stage of the book. “Why Lovecraft, why now?” Cosmic indifferentism seems akin to the results of gestalt real-time reviewing fiction books as objects become preternatural forces separate from humanity. Do they retain such power even if no-one reads them? impossible to answer, of course.
    age
    Reply


  4. The introduction deals thoroughly with the whys and wherefores of the high profile of Lovecraft in modern days, his racism etc etc
    The first essay proper is:
    GHOULISH DIALOGUES: HP Lovecraft’s Weird Geographies
    by James Kneale (cultural and historical geographer at University College London.)
    My review will continue in due course below….
    Reply


  6. From Introduction –
    “Since one purpose of this book is to reflect on the significance of Lovecraft’s increasing popularity, not to mention his marked impact on early twentieth-first-century discourse, we cannot dismiss the problem of racism as irrelevant, nor can we resolve it to everyone’s satisfaction.”
    Reply

  7. MY EARLIER REAL-TIME REVIEW OF “THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK” Panther COLLECTION, AT THE BOTTOM OF WHICH PAGE IS ALSO A LINK TO MY REVIEW OF ‘THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH’: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/the-haunter-of-the-dark-hp-lovecraft/
    —————–
    I have now read the first few pages of the James Kneale essay where we seem to be given permission to brainstorm upon HPL’s style and influence, where, just as one example, style awkwardness can lead to some sort of weird truth or insight (as my review above has ALREADY done!) i.e.:-
    “The Age of Lovecraft might, in fact, be weirder than many of the fictions in his name.”
    Weird style outweighing its weird content.
    More later…
    Reply

    • Content versus style, a tension that concerned me personally ever since studying Russian Formalism in the 1960s and Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy. There is much food for thought in this essay, cubism and triangulation, and objects seen in their own right as flensed and flayed from under ‘unimagined’ layers of allusion. And his stories’ triangulated growing technics of transmission now taken further abroad within HPL’s residual ‘gray areas’ and spacing – as sexed up by the Internet?
      References to Poe, Miéville and Stross. And Graham Harman.
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    • Looking back from the beyond of HPL’s Gothic narratives, and by dealing with the Gothic as THING-POWER, there are factored in, inter alia, Danielewski’s HOUSE oF Leaves, KIngs’s Overlook Hotel, Poe’s House of Usher, the Whovian TARDIS, and forbidden texts like The Necronomicon, and we are given a decidedly oblique slant on Lovecraft fiction texts, text that radiates more than what the words themselves mean, I guess. And, for me these thing-powers represent the flotsam and jetsam that I myself talked about in 2006:-
      “It is much more complex than simple suspension of belief (or even disbelief). Horror fiction, at its best, enters our individual territories and becomes part and parcel of a revolving realm with Death at its core: and, in this realm, all the flotsam and jetsam of life (the richest life being generated by the imagination as well as by the day-to-day interaction of our minds and bodies) spin round, some colliding only to ricochet off, others sticking together, some being swallowed whole or bit by bit. Eventually, the various items are sucked into the core where they are minced up or refined into streams of sense (or apparent sense or, even, nonsense) which are then released from that realm into other revolving realms which create new collisions, fusions and spin-offs. This is using Death as a positive tool, as it surely is. Without Death, we’d be nothing.”
      Above quoted from my blog here in 2006: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/free-fiction.html
      Reply

  9. The third essay is
    HYPER-CACOPHONY: Lovecraft, Speculative Realism, and Sonic Materialism
    By Isabella van Elferen (Professor of music and director of research for the School of Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University London.)
    Reply

  10. The fourth essay is
    PREHISTORIES OF POSTHUMANISM: Cosmic Indifferentism, Alien Genesis, and Ecology from H. P. Lovecraft to Ridley Scott
    By Brian Johnson (associate professor and graduate chair of English at Carleton University)
    Reply

  TO BE CONTINUED: HERE