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Although many of weird fiction’s pioneers were anti-materialist writers, the tradition’s central figure, H.P. Lovecraft, advocated a philosophy of “mechanistic materialism” in his letters and essays as well as his fiction. His materialism is essentially contemplative and theoretical, however, focused on intellectual investigations of and philosophical reflections on the weird. The English writer William Hope Hodgson, author of The House on the Borderland (1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909), and The Night Land (1912), introduced a different kind of materialism into weird fiction: a materialism not of aristocratic contemplation, scientific experimentation, and resulting madness, but of manual labor, physical struggle, and psychological resistance. Hodgson’s protagonists, and through them his readers, encounter the disruptions of natural law that define the weirdness of his vision through the forms of labor which define the characters’ lives, and those encounters reveal the weird itself to entail a kind of labor that encompasses and exceeds human activity. The labor of the weird and the resistance to it transform the human subject who undergoes them and those transformations are reflected in the language of Hodgson’s tales, imposing a labor of the weird on the reader as well. This attention to labor, its psychological effects and textual representation, makes Hodgson’s fantastic materialism relevant to contemporary debates over the controversial aesthetics and politics of the weird. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a critical analysis on the theme of wonders and wanderings in J.R.R. Tolkien's novel "The Hobbit" and "The Travels of Marco Polo" by Rustichello da Pisa and Italian explorer Marco Polo. Topics discussed include both the works as tales of journeys, similarities in the protagonists of both the works with Bilbo Baggins in "The Hobbit" and Marco Polo, wonders of a diamond mountain described by Polo and dragon guarding a treasure in "The Hobbit."

In the Beowulf -manuscript, the Old English Wonders of the East and Letter of Alexander to Aristotle interrogate how knowledge of cultural 'others' is produced in the context of empire and invasion. This commentary comes to fruition in the Letter, which uses the verb ongitan to describe Alexander's dual desire to understand and conquer Indian 'wonders'. As a vernacular translation that narrates histories of ancient Greek empire accessed via Latin sources, the Letter both anticipates and complicates later iterations of postcolonial critique, offering insight into the unique historical positioning of Anglo-Saxon readers, writers, and the global imagination they exercise [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the oddities and the treatment of themes in the novel "The Odd Women," by George Gissing. Topics discussed include the courtship and relationship of the characters of Edmund Widdowson and Monica Madden, of the characters enjoying the pleasures of travel, and the expression of sympathy in the novel.

Ocular pathologies are a natural phenomenon that can be detected empirically. All over the world, such phenomena are often interpreted as an index of inherent personal capacity for causing harm. The Graeco-Roman world was no exception. During the early Roman Principate, the literary representation of such malformations was clearly influenced by two genres that had been developed in the Greek world during the Hellenistic period. The first was the paradoxographic or mirabilia tradition, a literary genre that in the aftermath of Alexander's conquests inventoried supposed natural and anthropological wonders, reports that were subsequently brought up to date and adapted by Roman authors such as Cicero and Varro. The second was physiognomics, the systematization, mainly by the Peripatetics but also by some Hippocratic authors, of the popular idea that ethical character can be read from somatic signs. This paper understands Pliny the Elder's accounts of peoples and families able to cast the evil eye, objectified in the possession of a double pupil, as a significant aspect of his socio-moral account of the effects of world-empire upon Rome. In transposing the theme to his figure of the procuress Dipsas almost a century earlier, Ovid created a synecdoche for moral disorder at Rome itself shortly before the two Augustan laws of 18 b.c.e. regulating sexual conduct. In short, if we are to progress in our understanding of Roman socio-moral instrumentalization of ocular malformation in relation to the evil eye, we must pay careful attention to the contexts and strategies of our texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of women as alleged sources for Qing dynasty zhiguai (tales of the strange) collections, particularly Ji Yun's (1724-1805) Yuewei caotang biji (Jottings from the Cottage of Close Scrutiny). Tracing circulation of narratives across both single-sex and mixed-sex networks sheds light on those networks, and on shared or divergent lore and interpretations as tales are cooperatively assembled. The absence or presence of female narrators or listeners in tales focused on women's behavior also reveals differing articulations of vice and virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the integration of the concept of enigma and riddles into Archer Taylor's poetry. Distinction between enigma and riddle; Ability to transform a riddle into a poetry by its trooping characteristic; Example of the ice-water and mother-daughter riddle in Old English.