scholarly journals WEIRD FICTION IN BRITAIN 1880-1939 (2018), DE JAMES MACHIN

Abusões ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Resende
Keyword(s):  
Weird Fiction

scholarly journals The Absolute as the Meeting Point Between Speculation and Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 349-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daina Habdankaitė
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Meeting Point ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Weak Points ◽  
The Absolute

AbstractThe 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.

scholarly journals Other Ethics: Decentering the Human in Weird Horror

2017 ◽  
pp. 12-24
Author(s):  
Marianne Gunderson
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
The Absolute

Margrit Shildrick has argued that the monster’s ability to disturb and unsettle arises from its position as simultaneously same and different, both self and other at the same time. Through an analysis of Algernon Blackwood’s novella The Willows, this article discusses the challenge posed by the nonhuman Absolute other, the nebulous creatures whose whose difference is total, as they appear in weird fiction. Drawing on posthuman theory, it explores the ethical implications of imagining the crumbling horizons of human subjectivity in the meeting with the absolute and unknowable other. This article argues that by bringing concepts such as the horror of scale, ecophobia, the transformative power of awe, and the strangeness of matter into the monstrous figure, the weird undermines the structures that constructs human, culture, and mind as separate and different from the non-human, nature, and matter. By making us imagine a perspective from which humans are not just insignificant, but irrelevant, weird fiction not only challenges the anthropocentric worldview, but also makes us aware of the limitations and situatedness of human experience.

scholarly journals Centenarian “Weird Fiction” from Providence in Contemporary Poland. Translational Models and the Reception of Short Stories by Howard Phillips Lovecraft – the Case Study of “Dagon”

2020 ◽  
Vol nr specjalny 1(2020) ◽  
pp. 311-334
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Luboń ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Translation Techniques ◽  
Conventional Models ◽  
American Author ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Translational Models

The article discusses the conventional models and translation techniques, which are most common among the Polish translators of the weird fiction by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The proposed classification of such models, aimed at either “popularisation,” “stereotypisation” or “revision” of Lovecraft’s short stories, presents the impact of extra-textual factors (vision of the writer, target group of readers, cultural and political influences) on the content, language and style of translated works by the American author. The comparative analysis takes into consideration one of the early short stories by Lovecraft, “Dagon” (1917), and its Polish versions by Arnold Mostowicz (1973), Robert Lipski (1994) and Maciej Płaza (2012).

scholarly journals Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H. P. Lovecraft's ‘The Rats in the Walls’

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-110
Author(s):  
Dennis Wilson Wise
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Weird Fiction

The early short story ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924) is recognized as the best of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction prior to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, but this story is also non-cosmic and therefore (for some) not truly ‘Lovecraftian’. In conjunction with dense prose and seemingly throwaway references, this view has made ‘Rats’ arguably the most inadequately read of Lovecraft's major works. This article proposes that we read ‘Rats’, Lovecraft's first tale within an unofficial ‘witch cult’ trilogy, as a story of the path not taken in modern weird fiction. Using Henry James's ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) as a companion piece, I argue that the international weird forms a major component of Lovecraft's text. Far from portraying horrors merely personal in scope, Lovecraft uses the Delapore family and their geographical dislocations between two distinct nation-states, America and England, to signal what he sees as the historical rise and fall – or evolution and de-evolution – of culture itself.

The Contemporary Gothic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xavier Aldana Reyes
Keyword(s):  
Social Value ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Viral Nature ◽  
Artistic Tradition

The writings covered to by the umbrella term “Gothic” are so varied in style, thematic interests, and narrative effects that an overarching definition becomes problematic and even undesirable. The contemporary Gothic, drawing on an already fragmented and heterogenic artistic tradition, is less a genre than a vestigial type of writing that resuscitates older horrors and formulas and filters them through the echo chambers of a modern preoccupation with the social value of transgressive literature. In a century when the Gothic has once again exploded in popularity, and following a period of strong institutionalization of its study in the 1990s and 2000s, establishing some of its key modern manifestations and core concerns becomes a pressing issue. The Gothic may be fruitfully separated from horror, a genre premised on the emotional impact it seeks to have on readers, as a type of literature concerned with the legacy of the past on the present—and, more importantly, with the retrojecting of contemporary anxieties into times considered more barbaric. These have increasingly manifested in neo-Victorian fictions and in stories where settings are haunted by forgotten or repressed events but also by weird fiction, where encounters with beings and substances from unplumbed cosmic depths lead to a comparable temporal discombobulation. The intertextual mosaics of the contemporary Gothic also borrow from and recycle well-known myths and figures such as Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster in order to show their continued relevance or else to adapt their recognizable narratives to the early 21st century. Finally, the Gothic, as a type of literature that is quickly becoming defined by the cultural work it carries out and by its transnational reach, has found in monstrosity, especially in its mediation of alterity, of traumatic national pasts and of the viral nature of the digital age, a fertile ground for the proliferation of new nightmares.

‘[…] tentacular invisible mother divine!’: (The) Weird (in) Metal as convergence of sonic extremities and literary margins

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Norman
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Black Death ◽  
The Core ◽  
Weird Fiction ◽  
Extreme Metal

Weird Fiction is often understood as an unclassifiable fusion of horror, science fiction (SF) and fantasy, and therefore a kind of generically hybridized writing. Here I discuss various parallels between Weird Fiction and music marketed and recognized as ‘extreme metal’, an umbrella term for bands playing in the core styles of black, death and doom metal, and their various offshoots like grindcore and sludge. Analysis of all Weird Metal is beyond the scope of this article, so I focus on artists who achieve Weirdness through the presence and interrelationship of hybridity, numinosity (an overwhelming feeling of majesty) and alterity (radical difference), especially: Wolves in the Throne Room, Howls of Ebb, Portal, A Forest of Stars, Voices and (The Unsearchable Riches of) Void. I also consider how metal relates to the ‘New Weird’, radical developments in traditions of the form, concluding with thoughts on the wider theorization of The Weird.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document