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"Supernatural Horror in Literature" is a non-fiction survey of the field of horror fiction by the famed horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, written between November 1925 and May 1927, and revised in 1933-1934. It was first published in 1927 in the one-shot magazine The Recluse.[1]
Lovecraft examines the roots of weird fiction in the gothic novel (relying heavily on Edith Birkhead's 1921 survey The Tale of Terror), and traces its development through such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe (who merits his own chapter), and Ambrose Bierce. Lovecraft names as the four "modern masters" of horror Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James.
An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia calls the work "HPL's most significant literary essay and one of the finest historical analyses of horror literature."[2] Upon reading the essay, M. R. James proclaimed Lovecraft's style "most offensive."[3] However, Edmund Wilson, who was not an admirer of Lovecraft's fiction, praised the essay as a "really able piece of work...he had read comprehensively in this field-he was strong on the Gothic novelists-and writes about it with much intelligence".[4]
The essay is now available in its annotated form (with a bibliography of the authors mentioned in the essay and an introduction) by S. T. Joshi under the title of The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, (Hippocampus Press, 2000). It is also included in The Modern Library's volume At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition (The Modern Library, 2005).
Footnotes
- ^ S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Supernatural Horror in Literature", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 255.
- ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 255.
- ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 256.
- ^ Quoted in the Afterward to H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror, edited by Dave Carson and Stephen Jones,1994.
External links
- Supernatural Horror in Literature—eText at yankeeclassic.com
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