Edited by David Simmons

Back Cover Text

“H.P. Lovecraft, the amateur, anti-modern horror writer from Providence, Rhode Island, is no longer a marginal footnote in American literary history but an increasingly important figure. His influence now slithers everywhere, from film to philosophy, from protest politics to ecology. Cthulhu is arisen! Quite how, why, and when this happened is the subject of this collection of illuminating essays. Pooling leading Lovecraft scholars with emerging voices (even, heaven forfend, some women!), Simmons gives us the tools to examine Lovecraft’s extraordinary fiction. Frames include slime, time, abjection, geographical exploration, and the female uncanny—a toolbox to explore a vital writer who speaks urgently to our desperate era.“

“Timely and provocative, Simmons’s collection moves Lovecraft from the outer space of the margins to the centre of current cultural debate. Topics include Lovecraft’s ethnic and gender paranoia, his response to modernism, and his philosophical speculation. The shaping influence of Lovecraft’s eldritch tales on comics and rock music, as well as ‘New Weird’ literature is expertly opened up in this highly readable book.”

“This anthology is the most significant book on Lovecraft ever written. Especially noteworthy are the elucidations of Lovecraft in relation to the female Gothic and the context of popular culture.”

New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft offers an exciting investigation of this significant writer’s works and influence. In this collection a range of noted scholars, novelists, and writers take a multidisciplinary approach, exploring Lovecraft’s life, his most beloved stories, and his continuing presence in popular culture. Their work creates a book that is enlightening for both academics and fans of a figure that Stephen King called “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”

David Simmons is a Lecturer in American Literature, Film, and TV at the University of Northampton, UK. He has published extensively on twentieth-century American popular culture. His books include The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut, New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, and Investigating Heroes: Truth, Justice and Quality TV.

Contents

List of Figures
Foreword by S.T. Joshi
Acknowledgments

Introduction: H.P. Lovecraft: The Outsider No More? David Simmons

Part I: Lovecraft and His Fiction

1. “A Certain Resemblance”: Abject Hybridity in H.P. Lovecraft’s Short Fiction; David Simmons
2. “Spawn of the Pit”: Lavinia, Marceline, Medusa, and All Things Foul: H.P. Lovecraft’s Liminal Women; Gina Wisker
3. “The Infinitude of the Shrieking Abysses”: Rooms, Wombs, Tombs, and the Hysterical Female Gothic in “The Dreams in the Witch-House”; Sara Williams
4. Slime and Western Man: H. P. Lovecraft in the Time of Modernism; Gerry Carlin and Nicola Allen
5. Looming at the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft’s Mirages; Robert Waugh
6. On “The Dunwich Horror”; Donald Burleson

Part II: Lovecraft and His Influence

7. The Shadow over Derleth: Disseminating the Mythos in The Trail of Cthulhu; J. S. Mackley
8. From the Library of America to the Mountains of Madness: Recent Discourse on H.P. Lovecraft; Steffen Hantke
9. Co(s)mic Horror; Chris Murray and Kevin Corstorphine
10. “Sounds Which Filled Me with an Indefinable Dread”: The Cthulhu Mythopoeia of H.P. Lovecraft in “Extreme” Metal; Joseph Norman
11. “Comrades in Tentacles”: H.P. Lovecraft and China Miéville; Martyn Colebrook
12. Tentacles and Teeth: The Lovecraftian Being in Popular Culture; Mark Jones

Notes on Contributors
Index

Reviews

• Review by Steve Ahlquist (Motif Magazine)

Bibliographic Information

New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft. Edited by David Simmons. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan; 2013; ISBN 978-1-137-33224-0; hardcover; 280 pages.

Purchasing This Book

This book may be purchased in hardcover from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or directly from the publisher, Palgrave Macmilla.