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16 pages, 258 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“If I Ain’t a Man Anymore, How’s That Different from Just Being Dead?”: The Postfeminist Gothic in Lovecraft Country

by Colleen Tripp

Humanities 2025, 14(3), 48; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14030048 - 2 Mar 2025

Viewed by 964

Bridging the horrors of the Black American experience with the literary legacies of the postfeminist Gothic, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country comments on the deformation of time and space for Black women. Reflecting the historic preoccupation of the Gothic with the social anxieties of gender and sexuality, many of Lovecraft Country’s chapters center on economically or socially mobile Black women and respond to the contemporary conditions of the postfeminist Gothic and intersectional discourses of race, class, and gender. In the end, Lovecraft Country signals White patriarchal colonial geography as weird and represents its Black women characters as figuratively undead modern subjects due to intersectional oppression. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Legacy of Gothic Tradition in Horror Fiction)

13 pages, 341 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Dr. Cinderella and the Bronze Artifact, Cardinal Napellus and the Copper Globe: Was Gustav Meyrink an Early Adopter of M.R. James’s Ghostly Fiction?

by Martin Voracek

Humanities 2024, 13(6), 162; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13060162 - 21 Nov 2024

Viewed by 1010

Abstract

Hitherto unnoticed similarities between two short stories by Gustav Meyrink and two of the most renowned and widely read ghost stories of M.R. James are detailed through comparative literary analysis. Specifically, one early occult horror tale of Meyrink, The Plants of Dr. Cinderella (1905), shows no less than about 15 congruences beneath the plot level (concerning specific story requisites) with M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904), as does, to the same extent, a later, widely known Meyrink tale (The Cardinal Napellus, 1914) vis-à-vis M.R. James’s Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance (1911). Although direct, conclusive evidence is unavailable, a nexus of circumstantial evidence, building on extensive biographical and bibliographical inquiries, convergently attests to these assumed literary influences on Meyrink: for both cases, the chronology is intact and thus possible; Meyrink was expertly fluent in English and well-connected to England and English literature; and, these borrowings are reminiscent of other, already known originality issues surrounding Meyrink’s work. Altogether, these new discoveries shed fresh light on idiosyncrasies of Meyrink’s creative process, imagination, and literary production; on his still under-researched literary inspirational sources; as well as on the early reception of M.R. James’s ghostly fiction beyond the anglophone sphere. Full article

14 pages, 284 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

by Sharae Deckard and Kerstin Oloff

Humanities 2020, 9(3), 86; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030086 - 19 Aug 2020

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 6445

Abstract

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue World Literature and the Blue Humanities)

14 pages, 1837 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Corinthian Echoes: Gaiman, Kiernan, and The Dreaming as Sadomodernist Gothic Memoir

by Sean Moreland

Humanities 2020, 9(2), 29; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9020029 - 4 Apr 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4354

Abstract

This article examines Caitlín R. Kiernan’s writing for the DC/Vertigo comic series The Dreaming, a spin-off of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. It places Kiernan’s writing for the series in the wider context of both her prose fictional writings and representations of LGBTQI+ characters in American comics. It uses Moira Weigel’s concept of “sadomodernism” to characterize Kiernan’s writings, demonstrating how Kiernan’s use of this mode in The Dreaming anticipated signature characteristics of her later fictions. Close reading of selected excerpts from the published comics, as well as Kiernan’s scripts, emails, and editorial remarks alongside the work of queer and trans theorists, including Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, reveal how groundbreaking Kiernan’s unsettling work with the series was and remains. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Entangled Narratives: History, Gender and the Gothic)

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17 pages, 262 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Altar Call of Cthulhu: Religion and Millennialism in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos

by Benjamin E. Zeller

Religions 2020, 11(1), 18; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11010018 - 30 Dec 2019

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 15358

Abstract

Religion suffuses H.P. Lovecraft’s (1890–1937) short stories—the most famous of which, “The Call of Cthulhu,” has led to a literary subculture and a shared mythos employed by Lovecraft’s successors. Despite this presence of religion in Lovecraft’s work, scholars of religion have paid relatively little attention to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos, with a few notable exceptions. This article offers a close analysis of millennialism within Lovecraft’s thought, especially as expressed in three of his “Cthulhu mythos” stories: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” This article considers Lovecraft’s formative experiences and non-fiction writings so as to contextualize his approach and millennial outlook. Tied to his nativist views of social decline, I argue that Lovecraft expresses in his fiction a peculiar form of millennialism, “anti-millennialism,” which entails the reversal of traditional millennialism, offering no hope in a collective salvation, but rather expectation that the imminent future would bring only decline. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue This and Other Worlds: Religion and Science Fiction)

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