Logo image
A Dark Decaying Force: Weird Realism and Racial Hyperobjectivity in H.P. Lovecraft
Thesis   Open access

A Dark Decaying Force: Weird Realism and Racial Hyperobjectivity in H.P. Lovecraft

Stephen Andrew Watson
University of West Florida Libraries
Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida
2022

Metrics

955 File views/ downloads
287 Record Views

Abstract

The vast body of work by supernatural horror writer H.P. Lovecraft has widely influenced modern literature and reached into popular and academic culture. Despite the undeniable effect of Lovecraft’s genre-defying and defining work, his mass of letters, essays, and poetry have been widely under- or misrepresented by scholars and critics. This representation of Lovecraft—determined only by his fiction and popular poems—offers an anemic depiction of the multifaceted interests that Lovecraft explored. From astronomy, philosophy, politics, and history, Lovecraft became one of the foremost self-educated writers in American history. His essays, letters, and poetry, provide a holistic framework for approaching his widely-criticized views on race and racial politics. Through his work, personal obsessions with British antiquarianism morph into Anglophilic metaphors of ancient alien deities and draw on his fears of human insignificance: the key characteristic of Lovecraft’s cosmicism and cosmic cynicism. Lovecraft predicts Timothy Morton’s hyperobject in the way he presents race as the core producer of terror through internal and ecological degeneration, terrestrial and cosmic invasion, and individual alienation from one’s race or species. Ultimately, Lovecraft’s work creates not just a complex metaphorical world with ancient cosmic beings, clear presentations of his xenophobia, or contempt for the comma, but a “key” to the writer’s troubled life and declining psychology.
pdf
A Dark Decaying Force404.67 kBDownloadView
Preprint Thesis pdf Open Access

Details

Logo image