![]() ![]() Lovecraft cited many of his British predecessors and contemporaries as among his major influences, including Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and M. These three writers tended to dominate the pages of Weird Tales, a pulp magazine started in 1923, where most of this era’s weird fiction could be found.īut weird fiction wasn’t just an American genre! In fact, it was quite popular across the pond in Great Britain, and there was plenty of literary exchange among the British and American writers. Like Smith, Howard played in Lovecraft’s sandbox and contributed a few original characters to the mythos. Howard, who alternated between writing weird fiction and fantasy adventures. Another Lovecraft Circle author was Robert E. One of these authors was Clark Ashton Smith, who occasionally wrote stories within or adjacent to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos as well as inventing several of his own fictional worlds. ![]() Lovecraft actively sought out other authors writing weird fiction and would strike up a correspondence with them, introducing them to each other and trading ideas. The most prominent of these were the network of authors since dubbed by critics as the “Lovecraft Circle.” H.P. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, however, that authors really began to identify their own works as being in the “weird” genre. The term has also been applied to Ambrose Bierce, writing just a few decades later. ![]() Some scholars consider Edgar Allan Poe to be the progenitor of weird fiction, although such terminology would not have been used at the time of his writing, in the 1830s and ’40s. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present.” That “something more” can involve extra-dimensional beings, alien life-forms, or monstrous creatures outside the usual canon of vampires and werewolves-or it can be left entirely ambiguous, just a vague and unsettling sensation left open for the reader to interpret. Lovecraft differentiates weird fiction from the classic Gothic tales and ghost stories, saying: “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. In his 1927 essay “ Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H. It’s important to note, however, that in order for a story to be considered “weird,” it must bring something to the table that makes it different from the typical ghost story. James, and Vernon Lee-listed under both categories. The timeline of weird fiction almost exactly overlaps with the golden age of the ghost story, and in fact you’ll see many of the same authors-such as Algernon Blackwood, M. Weird fiction developed in the second half of the Victorian era, which was a particularly fertile period for new literary genres. Lovecraft, and due to the popularity of his Cthulhu Mythos is tends to be represented by tentacle imagery. The genre is most famously associated with the author H.P. It often blends horror together with science fiction and fantasy, giving its horror elements a weird and unusual twist. Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction, usually in the form of short stories, that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is weird fiction? Well, it’s sort of right there in the name. Today, I want to explore one of the Gothic’s more nebulous offspring: weird fiction. I have touched briefly on the role that the Gothic played in the development of modern horror and explored in some depth how we can credit it as the foundation of the detective novel. One reason why the Gothic can be difficult to pin down as a genre is that over the years, it has spawned and overlapped with many different genres.
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