Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary in the Stories of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft

by Jason Ray Carney

Overview

 Serious literary artists such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf loom large in most accounts of the literary art of the first half of the 20th century. And yet, working in the shadows cast by these modernists were science fiction, horror and fantasy writers like the "Weird Tales Three": H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard.

They did not publish in artistically ambitious magazines like Dial, The Smart Set and The Little Review but instead in commercial pulp magazines like Weird Tales. Contrary to the stereotypes about pulp fiction and those who wrote it, these three were serious literary artists who used their fiction to speculate about such philosophical questions as the function of art and the brevity of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476668031
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Publication date:	08/09/2019
Pages:	205
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.42(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jason Ray Carney is a lecturer in the Department of English of Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. He is the co-editor of the academic journal The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies and the area chair of the "Pulp Studies" section of the Popular Culture Association.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
 1. Introduction
 2. Pulp Ekphrasis, History, and Deformation
 3. A Real Weird Magazine
 4. Clark Ashton Smith and Artistic Form
 5. The Failure of Clark Ashton Smith
 6. The Cultural Alienation of Robert E. Howard
 7. Robert E. Howard and Rendering the Real and the Unreal
 8. Cthulhu Is Beautiful
 9. Lovecraft and the Threat of Modernism
10. Conclusion: Form and Formlessness
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Plac[es] pulp fiction in a broader historical and literary context."—American Literature

From the Publisher