Edited by Scott Connors

From the Introduction

     As the 110th anniversary of Lovecraft’s birth approached, his reputation both popular and critical continued to grow. Despite the publication of several books by the academic press, there has been a paucity of journal articles outside of Lovecraft Studies. Attempts to place articles in non-specialist venues have met with limited success, although pieces such as Joyce Carol Oates’ positive assessment in the New York Review of Books have done as much to advance HPL’s reputation as Edmund Wilson’s earlier negative response did to impede it. This raises the question as to whether academic acceptance of Lovecraft should be the goal toward which scholars devote their energy. Would academic acceptance lead to a situation where he is more studied than read? The recent Penguin edition of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories for their “Twentieth-Century Classics” is a step in the right direction; after all, one advertising slogan for that series is “the library of every thinking person.” In the final analysis this is, in fact, how I think that Lovecraft would have liked to be remembered.

Contents

• Introduction
  Scott Connors

  Continuity

  H.P. Lovecraft

  “The Silver Key” and Lovecraft’s Childhood

  Kenneth Faig (previously appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu 81: 11-47)

  Who Needs the Cthulhu Mythos?

  David E. Schultz (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 13: 43-53)

  Higher Criticism and the Necronomicon

  Robert M. Price (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 6: 3-13)

  Beyond the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft and the Antarctic

  Jason C. Eckhardt (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 14: 31-38)

  Arkham Country: In Rescue of the Lost Searchers

  Robert D. Marten (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 39: 1-20)

  Dr. Margaret Murray and H.P. Lovecraft: The Witch-Cult in New England

  Robert H. Waugh (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 31: 2-10)

  Humor and Satire in Lovecraft

  S.T. Joshi (previously appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu 61: 3-13)

  H.P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality

  Steven J. Mariconda (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 29: 2-12)

  The Structural and Thematic Unity of Fungi from Yuggoth

  Robert H. Waugh (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 26: 2-14)

  Metonyms of Alterity: A Semiotic Interpretation of Fungi from Yuggoth

  Dan C. Clore (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 30: 21-32)

  “Pickman’s Model”: H.P. Lovecraft’s Model of Terror

  James Anderson (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 22/23: 15-21)

  The Mythic Hero Archetype in “The Dunwich Horror”

  Donald R. Burleson (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 4: 3-9)

  Prismatic Heroes: The Colour out of Dunwich

  Donald R. Burleson (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 25: 13-18)

  “The Music of Erich Zann”: A Psychological Interpretation—or Two

  Carl J. Buchanan (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 27: 10-13)

  The Vanity of Existence in “The Shadow out of Time”

  Paul Montelone (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 34: 27-35)

  Tightening the Coil: The Revision of “The Whisperer in Darkness”

  Steven J. Mariconda (previously appeared in Lovecraft Studies 32: 12-17)

  “H.P.L.”

  Clark Ashton Smith

  Selected Bibliography

  Contributors

  Acknowledgements

Bibliographic Information

A Century Less a Dream: Selected Criticism on H.P. Lovecraft. Edited by Scott Connors. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press; April 2002; ISBN 1587152150 (hardcover); 272 pages.

Purchasing This Book

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