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This paper investigates the autonomy of Nature in American cosmic horror literature. We have divided the American cosmic horror canon into two parts: the Lovecraftian and the post-millennial. The Lovecraftian phase, prefaced by the texts of Lovecraft himself, posits Nature as a corruptible and subservient entity, subdued by the alien cosmic and redeemed only by a rationalist agent/outsider, focusing on the late-twentieth century texts by Stephen King, T. E. D. Klein and Robert R. McCammon. In the post-millennial phase, rather than serving the cosmic, Nature becomes the cosmic, transcending the moulds of rationality and comprehension, becoming inscrutable and 'agential' in the process. Our case studies will include the works of Thomas Ligotti, Michael Wehunt, T. E. Grau and John Langan. While discerning Nature's autonomy, we will also discuss how a 'rational' Nature falls within the ambit of anthropocentrism, whereas an 'irrational' Nature, often mistaken as misanthropic, adopts absolute indifference towards the anthropos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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En 2002, el filósofo Eduard Punset entrevistó a David Cronenberg en el programa de televisión Redes. En dicha entrevista, el cineasta canadiense afirmó haber sido influenciado por una amalgama de escritores y pensadores, entre los cuales se encuentran Jean-Paul Sartre y H.P. Lovecraft. En este artículo analizamos las interferencias intertextuales así como las diferencias y similitudes entre la obra sartriana y los principios del horror cósmico lovecraftiano en el cine de Cronenberg. Del mismo modo, se trazan los preceptos ideológicos sobre los que esta intertextualidad ha podido influir en el body horror, el subgénero de horror del que el propio Cronenberg reniega, aunque sea considerado el pionero y principal exponente.

H.P. Lovecraft admired Edgar Allen Poe as his “God of Fiction,” having stumbled upon the literary works of Poe at the age of eight. To Lovecraft, Poe then served to replace Greek mythology and the Arabian Nights as his muse. Unfortunately, the degree to which his writing style and mood were thus significantly influenced by Poe is unknown, since very few of his works completed during his juvenile years remain today. Moreover, he did not admit the implicit influence of Poe until 1935. Joshi attributed Lovecraft’s denial of Poe’s influence to Harold Bloom’s concept of the “anxiety of influence.”1 However, it is still possible to trace the impact of Poe in Lovecraft’s literary works. Lovecraft’s idea of cosmic decline stemmed from his early reading of Poe, adroitly applying Poe’s gothic setting of terror to his own 20th -century stories. Throughout his body of work, however, Lovecraft developed a more pessimistic tone of cosmicism, with his Cthulhu Mythos and weird fiction; therein, his works stand apart from Poe’s. The following is a comparison and contrast of Lovecraft’s murder stories and those of Poe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H.P. Lovecraft admired Edgar Allen Poe as his “God of Fiction,” having stumbled upon the literary works of Poe at the age of eight. To Lovecraft, Poe then served to replace Greek mythology and the Arabian Nights as his muse. Unfortunately, the degree to which his writing style and mood were thus significantly influenced by Poe is unknown, since very few of his works completed during his juvenile years remain today. Moreover, he did not admit the implicit influence of Poe until 1935. Joshi attributed Lovecraft’s denial of Poe’s influence to Harold Bloom’s concept of the “anxiety of influence.”1 However, it is still possible to trace the impact of Poe in Lovecraft’s literary works. Lovecraft’s idea of cosmic decline stemmed from his early reading of Poe, adroitly applying Poe’s gothic setting of terror to his own 20th -century stories. Throughout his body of work, however, Lovecraft developed a more pessimistic tone of cosmicism, with his Cthulhu Mythos and weird fiction; therein, his works stand apart from Poe’s. The following is a comparison and contrast of Lovecraft’s murder stories and those of Poe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gothic studies and Game studies are beginning to be explored in connection with each other to find various configurations of Gothic elements in the cybertext of games. In this article, I explore various Gothic elements in Bloodborne. My methodology incorporates the analysis of the manifestation of Gothicism in the game through the interplay between the figure of the player character, miseen-scène, and the presence of psychologically affective states pertaining to the experience of playing the game. The role and aspects of player participation, performativity, and in-game mechanics are also examined with respect to the particular function they serve in the realization of the Gothic experience. The presence of Gothic and Lovecraftian tropes, symbolism, and elements of horror within the narrative are also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar las implicaciones de la propuesta lovecraftiana de horror cósmico en relación a las ideas que el creador de los “Mitos de Cthulhu” tenía sobre los mexicanos y sus deidades prehispánicas; para ello se hará la revisión de dos cuentos “The Transition of Juan Romero” (1919) y “The Electric Executioner” (1929).

Arthur Conan Doyle’s novelThe Lost World (1912) and H.P. Lovecraft’s story At the Mountains of Madness (1931) imagine the discovery of supposedly extinct or entirely unknown life forms from distant periods of earth history that survived in geographically isolated places: the Amazon rainforest and Antarctica. Drawing on discussions of the notion of weird fiction,I emphasize the ambivalent role of these remnants of the geological past. While both texts transfer the colonial appropriation of isolated spaces onto a temporal axis of earth history, the reappearance of the past unsettles the identity of the Western expeditions. In The Lost World, the juxtaposition of different temporalities irritates the idea of a teleological natural history heading towards Western civilisation. At the Mountains of Madness intensifies this confusion of roles and timescales when the expedition from New England loses its privileged and distanced position towards the past and becomes the object of colonial appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Rónai - Revista de Estudos Classicos e Tradutorios is the property of Ronai - Revista de Estudos Classicos e Tradutorios and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study analyzes the relationship between Thomas Ligotti and the genre of the strange, highlighting its connection with 20th-century Lovecraftian fiction and its contribution to macabre unrealism in 21st-century literature. The importance of focusing on emotions and the ability to disturb the reader instead of focusing on bloody arguments and the undead is emphasized. It is mentioned that some writers in this genre, like Ligotti, have faced criticism for moving away from supernatural elements in their stories. Ligotti uses darkness and unreality as central elements in his stories, exploring collective identity and human consciousness. His goal is to awaken awe in the macabre unreality of life. The dichotomy between external cosmic horror and deep internal horror in the works of Lovecraft and Ligotti is discussed. Ligotti's ability to capture the unthinkable and inconceivable in his writing, generating a sense of darkness and disorientation in the reader, is highlighted. Additionally, it is mentioned that the macabre unreality in Ligotti's works represents a place where the unthinkable comes to life and where human existence becomes a perpetual nightmare. [Extracted from the article]

Fantastic, speculative, and fantasy fiction share an appropriately uncanny relationship with psychoanalysis. Lovecraft and his semantic tentacles immediately come to mind. Indescribable, ineffable, unimaginable, Lovecraftian monsters appear, on the surface, as a perfect placeholder for the Lacanian Real. Following this model (shallow/depth), exemplified by Lacan’s seminar on «The Purloined Letter», «The Call of Cthulhu» has been often used as a parable for the Real. This text argues that Cthulhu cannot represent the real, at least, not anymore. It has become exhausted as a signifier, overrepresented in contemporary pop culture. In its stead, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, like the Real, cannot be pinned down due to its very nature. The Crawling Chaos or the God of a Thousand Faces travels in the same way as the signifier does: on one side its shape is permanently changing (Y-axis) but, at the same time, it crawls along the x-axis.

This paper, at the intersection of literary studies, computational literary analysis and psychology, analyzes Lovecraft's literary production throughout his career. Fifty-four writings from the period 1905–1935, which span almost all of his career as a fiction writer, have been studied by applying the computational techniques of sentiment analysis and following a methodology structured in three stages. In the first one, I analyzed each of the writings, in order to identify the relative percentage of emotion-inducing words according to Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. The second phase of this process consisted of hierarchical cluster analysis to identify homogeneous groups of works. Finally, in the third step of the research, I conducted a statistical analysis. The results point to three different conclusions. First, the quantitative analysis confirms that there exists an intimate connection between the emotions of fear and sadness in Lovecraft's writings, which generates an intense emotion of despair. Second, the vast majority of his works can be grouped into two categories, each with a distinct pattern in terms of emotions. Finally, there seems to be a relationship between the identified categories and the evolution of Lovecraft's style; that is, there is a temporal evolution toward much darker works, which are dominated by negative emotions.

Los monstruos han sido un personaje prototípico en la ficción popular y en los cómics. En las revistas españolas publicadas a lo largo de los años 70 y 80, los monstruos desarrollaron su seducción visual innata asociada a un tratamiento erótico. En este contexto Josep María Beà crea una obra muy singular. Estas páginas pretenden estudiar los dos tipos de monstruo que Beà construye, cada con sus propios referentes: Lovecraft y Max Ernst. Ambos modelos se combinan en una especie de collage que afecta tanto a nivel textual como gráfico en la historia de dos páginas titulada «Ernst Lovecraft» publicada en la revista Zona 84. El montaje que tiene lugar en esta historia puede concebirse como un tipo de poética en la que Beà intenta disolver las fronteras entre la cultura de masas derivada de los modelos literarios (Lovecraft) y las prácticas artísticas de Vanguardia (Max Ernst).

This article is an analysis of the HBO series Lovecraft Country in terms of the elements of racism and traditional horror elements present in it, including elements typical of the prose of one of the genre’s creators, H. P. Lovecraft. The purpose of the article is to explore typical horror elements that appear in the series and show how the authors of the series combine traditional horror with the horror of everyday life in the oppressed Black community in 1950s America. At the beginning of the article, the series and its main idea are described. The article then takes up the subject of the portrayal of racism in the series, specific examples of which are presented and discussed in terms of their compatibility with the realities of America at the time. The article also discusses elements related to the antiracism movement – situations presented in the series that exemplify the character’ struggle against racism are shown. Then the otherness depicted in the series is discussed – not only racial otherness, but also gender and sexual otherness; in this part of the article, otherness is given as a reason for oppression by society. The article also explores the use of traditional elements of horror genre in the series – it indicates which scenes in the series use the traditional concepts of the horror genre, and attempts to show which characters in the series function as monsters in the story. At the end of the article, it is explained how the series draws inspiration in the works of Lovecraft, whose name appears in the very title of the series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates Meillassoux’s notion of the absolute in relationship with the Kantian and Hegelian philosophical systems. The absolute, as independent of subjective consciousness, is showcased as the meeting point of speculation and fiction. By looking into Meillassoux’s notions of speculation and some works of weird fiction, it is argued that the significant role of imagination as well as a deferred temporality is what facilitates the discussion of both speculation and fiction as faculties able to transcend the limitations that are projected by the correlationist mind. Through a reading of Lovecraftian fiction, both the strong and weak points of Meillassoux’s argumentation in After Finitude and Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction are identified, proving the latter to be a less successful way of grasping the chaotic real.

Copyright of Revista FAMECOS - Mídia, Cultura e Tecnologia is the property of EDIPUCRS - Editora Universitaria da PUCRS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present work seeks to analyze the relationship between the film Berkeley Square (1933) and the work of the American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Although he was not a great admirer of cinema, the film analyzed seems to have been a case in which the author was impacted by the story to the point of using it as inspiration for some of his ideas. The tale The Shadow Out of Time (1936) seems to have been the lovecraftian version of Berkeley Square and the relation between the works is, in fact, curious. Here, we will present a bit about the author and the movie quoted so we can better understand how this curious dialogue takes place. The rich mythology of Lovecraft is always a curious terrain to be investigated, and in this case, an unusual inspiration in a film provides us with interesting material about the writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to study the image of three creatures - Shoggoth, Cthulhu and Dagon - based on the books of the writer H.P. Lovecraft and present in the game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. The main approach is from the perspective of the phenomenological categories and the semiotics of C.S. Peirce. Through the nine types of sign and the phenomenological categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness, an analysis of the visual components of the game images was made, compared to Lovecraft's writings. Through the semiotic analysis, it is noticed that the game succeeded in transposing fundamental signs of the Lovecraft's literature.

Este trabajo analiza la presencia de un patrón muy específico tanto en The Call of Cthulhu como en otras de las obras icónicas de Lovecraft. Combinando el análisis literario con técnicas computacionales de minería de textos, se ha podido cuantificar dicho patrón, que se articula alrededor de tres ejes. En primer lugar, la creación de una atmósfera vertebrada en torno a los sentimientos de miedo, confianza y tristeza, que además se presentan exactamente en ese orden de importancia, y cuya combinación genera emociones de sumisión y desesperación. El segundo eje está relacionado con el sentimiento de confianza, concentrada principalmente al principio de la obra, momento en el que se busca precisamente dotar de credibilidad a los extraordinarios hechos que se relatarán más adelante, en el clímax de la obra. Por último, el tercer eje es el giro final, en el que se produce una reacción de quien entra en contacto con las monstruosas criaturas, alcanzando una pírrica victoria, que sin embargo resulta inútil a largo plazo. Un sentimiento de ira creciente a lo largo de toda la obra, que alcanza su máximo precisamente en este último evento, refuerza esta idea de reacción última y desesperada.

Copyright of Culture, Language & Representation / Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación is the property of Universitat Jaume I and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article asks how Clive Barker responds to H. P. Lovecraft as a horror writer. It sees in Barker a particular example of how cosmic horror emerges, even as expected Gothic tropes become renewed with interesting variations. In particular, it foregrounds a resistance by Barker to Lovecraft's insistence that the Weird be a place where writers hint at the monsters that cause ultimate dread rather than drawing them. Barker, though, refuses to balk at such a demand, channelling the same instinct that the later Lovecraft himself developed in categorizing with scientific-like granularity the often horrific particulars of the monstrous. This article poses the Cenobites as a fitting example of how Barker combines cosmic and Gothic tropes, both within the frames of the posthuman and draconic, even as they morphed within a shared universe rooted in a Christianized metanarrative. It focuses on The Scarlet Gospels as the most fitting text in which Barker demonstrates his ability to represent the unrepresentable, a dominant concept within fruitful theorizing by thinkers as diverse as Eugene Thacker, Graham Harman and Thomas Ligotti. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Esta reflexão pretende pontuar as características em dinâmica que norteiam o conto Dagon, de Howard Phillips Lovecraft, e seu pertencimento histórico. Conto curto, Dagon fornece inúmeros elementos pertinentes para entender modos de pensar a realidade histórica no começo do século XX e suas heranças existenciais do final do século XIX. Trata de uma abordagem sensível sobre os elementos psicológicos, filosóficos e alegóricos que constituem a narrativa ficcional gótica de 1919. Como base teórica, os conceitos de Representação e Niilismo, frutos dos diálogos com Roger Chartier e Friedrich Nietzsche, respectivamente, nos são instrumentos possíveis de análise da fonte ficcional na interpretação da realidade histórica. Através dessa análise histórico-filosófica, esmiúça-se o conto Dagon para entender os aspectos construtivos de seu cenário verossimilhante e reconhecível de tempos bélicos e tal entrega interpessoal desesperante.

A água desponta na obra de H. P. Lovecraft não em seu caráter gerador de vida, mas no seu inverso, ou seja, como água parada ou água morta, que o teórico da literatura Gaston Bachelard reconhece na obra de outro ícone da literatura sobrenatural, Edgar Allan Poe. Este trabalho identifica a influência da materialidade aquática na composição dos contos Dagon, What the Moon Brings, The Colour out of Space, The Shadow over Innsmouth e The Call of Cthulhu. O método orientador das reflexões aqui apresentadas é chamado de temático inspirado na obra de Bachelard, segundo Bergez (2006). O estudo das imagens ligadas à água contribui para expandir o entendimento da obra de Lovecraft, comumente interpretada como terror cósmico.

The prospect of recognizing the ultimate is a matter of interpretation. As such, hermeneutics is used as a framework for describing the interactions of self, language, and the other (whether culturally other or ultimately other). Questioning whether religious ultimacy can be recognized across religious boundaries is based on a mistaken assumption that differences between religions are qualitatively different than differences within a religion. Hermeneutically speaking, intra-communal difference and inter-communal difference are of the same kind. If humans can negotiate the former, they can negotiate the latter. Recognizing ultimacy is an intersubjective act of phronēsis, or practical wisdom. As such, it cannot be explained in any detail apart from the concrete particulars of each encounter. Below is an account of recognizing the Ultimate, analyzed into four explanatory ways: its immediate quality (uncanniness), its vehicle (the classic), its cultural-linguistic mechanism (metaphorical appropriation), and its ontological implications (a signifying cosmos). Each way offers a different type of explanation as to how a person can recognize another religion’s ultimate. I begin with the most concrete: spontaneous feeling, and work my way to more speculative implications.

Copyright of Études de Stylistique Anglaise is the property of Societe de Stylistique Anglaise and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) is in vogue more than ever before. His creation – the Cthulhu mythos – is widely referenced across popular culture today. We can rightly speak of this as Lovecraft-mania, which is all the more unexpected considering Lovecraft's personal details: he never achieved job stability in his life, let alone fame, while he was convinced that humanity had no value when seen in relation with the whole universe. This article examines what lies at the source of Lovecraft-mania as cultural phenomenon. By relying on Durkheim's theory of religion, the article underlines the elements in Lovecraft's writings marking a distinction between profane and sacred – not the pure sacred in this case, but the impure (transgressive) sacred. Through his stories, Lovecraft transports his readers from a profane time-space to a sacred time-space. It is this experience of transcendence that accounts for the pleasure (as effervescence) one finds in reading Lovecraft. Following this logic, we can add that the famous monsters imagined by Lovecraft – Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep to name a few – do not stand as symbols of Lovecraft's own racism, but as celebrated religious totems in a Durkheimian sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages disability puppetry as plays of transactional object relations, opening into speculative realms, articulating new alignments of embodied and enminded difference. The examples here range from hospital practices via art/life pain-related somatic explorations to experimental poetics of classroom and gallery installations, and from there to small local theatres working in collaboration with mental health service providers. In all of these sites, disability and puppetry have much to say to one another, offering connection and new forms of meaning-making, using non-realist conventions to make new worlds in which disability stays present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether the twenty-first-century resurgence of H. P. Lovecraft and weird fiction can be read as a conceptual parallel to the Anthropocene epoch, taking Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s The Age of Lovecraft as a starting-point. The assumption is that the two ‘ages’ are historically and thematically linked through the ‘monsters’ that inhabit them; monsters that include—but are not limited to—extensions, reproductions, and evolutions of Lovecraft’s writings. Preoccupied with environmental issues such as global climate change, the twenty-first-century imaginary has conjured monsters that appear to have much in common with early twentieth-century cosmic horror stories. Considering the renewed interest in Lovecraft and the weird, such developments raise the question: What can (weird) monsters tell us about the Anthropocene moment? This paper maps the ‘monstrous’ in the discourses emerging from the Anthropocene epoch and ‘The Age of Lovecraft’ by considering (new) weird narratives from contemporary literature, graphic novels, film, TV, and video games. Mindful of on-going discussions within ecocriticism, philosophy, and critical theory, the paper discusses a handful of unconventional texts to investigate the potential of the weird for expressing Anthropocene anxieties and for approaching nonhuman realities from new angles.

El tema más notable de la narrativa de Lovecraft es suscitar al lector El miedo por lo desconocido, la emoción más antigua del ser humano. A los elementos de texto que se disponen y se estructuran en trayectos semánticos, como la ambientación y el imaginario del autor. El análisis de la isotopía de lo múltiple en los tres relatos elegidos, Las ratas de las paredes, La casa evitada y El modelo de Pickman. Lovecraftiano, y sirve de aproximación a las estructuras textuales que brindaron a suscitar el horror cósmico.

Presentación del monográfico: El universo fantástico de H. P. Lovecraft

Con la popularización de Lovecraft y la influencia de su imaginario a otros productos culturales como el cine o los videojuegos, se percibe una vulgarización de la esencia del escritor de Providence cuanto más comercial es el producto. Solo los productos más marginales y alternativos, como sucede con el metal en la música, mantienen, e incluso potencian, lo lovecraftiano. Aunque la vinculación de los Mitos de Cthulhu con la música metal tienen una larga tradición, en España recientemente han aparecido ocho bandas cuyas letras están relacionadas con la obra y figura de H. P. Lovecraft: Back to R'lyeh, GhÜl, Keziah, Cuerno, Nihil, Opositor y Yuggoth, Al Azif y Nyctophobia. El propósito de esta investigación es analizar de qué manera tratan estos grupos en sus letras los elementos lovecraftianos para ver cuál es la esencia del escritor de Providence que mantienen en sus canciones.