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Sto caricando le informazioni... Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universedi Donald R. Burleson
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Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890--1937) has been described variously as the successor to Edgar Allan Poe, a master of the Gothic horror tale, and one of the father of modern supernatural fantasy fiction. Published originally in pulp magazines, his works have grown in popularity since his death, so that more than thirty editions are currently in print.Yet only recently has Lovecraft received serious attention from literary critics. And until now no one has examined his work from a post-structuralist perspective. Donald Burleson fills that void, for the first time in an extended study bringing th Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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Some of my favorite analyses were those for "The Statement of Randolph Carter," "The Music of Erich Zann," and "The Color Out of Space," the last two of which ranked among HPL's favorites of his own stories. "The Cats of Ulthar" got a full treatment from Burleson, but I was left with the feeling that he had still only scratched the surface, even despite his droll final remark regarding feline lawlessness (48).
I would have liked it better if the attention to Indo-European roots made up a slightly lower proportion of the total text. I don't think that Burleson's method on this count is worthless, but after a few chapters, it starts to seem almost mechanical, in the way that he analyzes the story titles and key place and character names for their Indo-European roots and then takes the polyvalence of those roots as traces of textual strain and self-contradiction. Fortunately, there are many other facets to these studies.
The jacket copy proposes that the book is concerned with "establishing Lovecraft as an important figure in American literature," but Burleson's preface immediately acknowledges prior serious literary criticism regarding Lovecraft's work, and the focus throughout this study is on the texts, not the author. When Burleson discusses "The Outsider," he does not compare the protagonist to the author, but to the reader. He deprecates his own chronological arrangement of the analyzed stories as an arbitrary convenience (15-6), and never suggests a progression or development among them.
Burleson's work here is an excellent antidote to reductionist readings of Lovecraft, whether psychological, philosophical, ideological, or genealogical. Neither Lovecraft's unusual personal character, his atheism and "cosmicism," his racism, nor his inspirations from other writers can be credited with the quality that Burleson ultimately codes as unreadability, a self-deepening mystery that rewards those willing to explore the stories and their shadows, a transgressive concealment that is rooted in the very nature of language.