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

By Steven J. Mariconda

Back Cover Text

For nearly three decades, Steven J. Mariconda has been one of the keenest analysts of H. P. Lovecraft’s variegated literary work. In the 1980s, he wrote landmark articles on Lovecraft’s prose style, demonstrating how the dreamer from Providence utilized an array of rhetorical techniques to generate maximum power and effectiveness in the writing of weird fiction. Mariconda also focused on Lovecraft’s relations to Modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane, proving that Lovecraft was a small but significant voice in the general literary tendencies of his time.

Mariconda has also written penetrating articles on specific stories, including significant essays on the literary sources of “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” And in the pioneering article “Toward a Reader-Response Approach to the Lovecraft Mythos,” Mariconda showed how Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos grew out of responses by readers and fellow writers of Weird Tales as each story successively engendered a sense of the reality of this invented cosmogony.

As a reviewer, Mariconda has been acute in evaluating the leading Lovecraft scholarship of the past thirty years. But his work is far from solemn or pedantic; in an appendix to this book we find delightful strokes of humor, such as “A Real Hard Lovecraft Quiz.”

This volume of Steven J. Mariconda’s collected essays establishes him as a leading voice in the dynamic Lovecraft scholarship of our time.

Contents

Introduction
I. General Studies
  • H. P. Lovecraft: Consummate Prose Stylist
  • Lovecraft’s Concept of “Background”
  • Toward a Reader-Response Approach to the Lovecraft Mythos
  • Lovecraft’s Cosmic Imagery
  • H. P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact and Reality
  • H. P. Lovecraft: Reluctant American Modernist
  • “Expect Great Revelations”: Lovecraft Criticism in His Centennial Year
II. Essays on Specific Works
  • On “Amissa Minerva”
    • Amissa Minerva, by H.P. Lovecraft
  • “The Hound”—A Dead Dog?
  • “Hypnos”: Art, Philosophy, and Insanity
  • Curious Myths of the Middle Ages and “The Rats in the Walls”
  • Lovecraft’s “Elizabethtown”
  • On the Emergence of “Cthulhu”
  • The Subversion of Sense in “The Colour out of Space”
  • Tightening the Coil: The Revision of “The Whisperer in Darkness”
  • Lovecraft’s Role in “The Tree on the Hill”
  • Some Antecedents of the Shining Trapezohedron
III. Reviews
  • The Corrected Texts of Lovecraft’s Tales
    • The Dunwich Horror and Others (Arkham House)
    • At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Arkham House)
    • Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Arkham House)
    • The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft (Arcane Wisdom)
  • Lovecraft’s Essays, Poems, and Letters
    • In Defence of Dagon (Necronomicon Press)
    • Commonplace Book (Necronomicon Press)
    • Medusa and Other Poems (Cryptic Publications)
    • Letters to Richard F. Searight (Necronomicon Press)
    • Miscellaneous Writings (Arkham House)
  • Some Lovecraft Scholars
    • Donald R. Burleson. H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Greenwood Press)
    • Maurice Lévy. Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (Wayne State University Press)
    • Donald R. Burleson. Lovecraft: Disturbing the Univers (University Press of Kentucky)
    • S.T. Joshi. H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (Starmont House)
    • Mark Valentine. Arthur Machen (Seren)
    • S.T. Joshi. H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press)
    • Peter Cannon, ed. Lovecraft Remembered (Arkham House)
    • S.T. Joshi. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press)
    • H.P. Lovecraft. O Fortunate Floridian: H.P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R.H. Barlow (University of Tampa Press)
    • H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (Hippocampus Press)
Anodyne Amusing Appendix
  • Top Ten Worst Potential Lovecraft Fanzine Names Culled from the Fiction
  • Top Ten Reasons Why Lovecraft Is “Real” Literature
  • A Real Hard Lovecraft Trivia Quiz
Afterword
Works Cited
Sources
Index

Bibliographic Information

H.P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality. By Steven J. Mariconda. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press; 2013; ISBN 978-1-61498-064-3; paperback; 308 pages.

Purchasing This Book

This book may be purchased in paperback from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or directly from the publisher, Hippocampus Press.

 
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