Monsters, Horror, Gaming

A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror

This is not a gaming-related post, but may interest some of this blog’s readers, since there’s a certain degree of overlap between my gaming interests and my academic ones.

The University of Wales Press has just published my first academic monograph, A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror. This book grew out of my dissertation on weird fiction, completed at the University of British Columbia.

The book is a study of weird fiction by key authors during the period indicated, beginning with Poe and ending with Lovecraft. In essence, it argues that in contrast with many of the clasically Gothic works that the Weird grows out of, weird fiction is focused not on human interiority – psychology, history, taboos, the buried secrets the Gothic spectrally manifests – but on the non-human, on the nature of reality itself. Furthermore, it suggests that the aesthetic key to this investigation into the primal, mysterious nature of things lies in the power of disgust. Disgust arises when what we’ve demarcated as “not-us” encroaches upon what we’ve defined as “us” – when the self is threatened with contamination from the Outside. Weird fiction, I argue in the book, is obsessed with this kind of confrontation, a breach of borders queasily suggesting that many of our self-conceptions are delusions – especially the idea that we are trascendental souls or hermetically sealed selves that can be separated from the unclean, physical world around us. Instead, these texts intimate, we are enmeshed in a seething, oozing, often eerily agentive morass of roiling materiality, a chaotic, messy, deeply weird universe. In the works of authors like Lovecraft, Hodgson, Blackwood, and others, stable boundaries between us and not-us, the self the the world, are exposed as anthropocentric conceits.

There’s a lot about monsters, slime, sentient tree-things, possession, putrescence, quasi-molluscoid hill-people, infectious fungi, and similar glooping horror. While written primarily for a scholarly audience, I’m of the belief that works of literary criticism don’t have to be rendered in dry, antiseptic prose, or as a stream of dense abstractions only intelligible to experts in continental philosophy. Indeed, I was playfully accused in my thesis defense of having adopted something of the style of weird fiction itself – lush, ornate, and a touch lurid – a charge to which I proudly plead guilty.

A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror is available through U of Wales Press, U of Chicago Press for North American distribution (there may currently be some delays there), and can be pre-ordered on Amazon and Indigo.

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8 Comments

  1. Alec

    Congratulations! Sounds great.

  2. Amazing! I just pre-ordered it on Amazon.

    • Bearded-Devil

      Oh thank you! It’s definitely “literary criticism that borrows from philosophy” as opposed to philosophy as such – and in a very different area than your specialization – but I hope you like it!

      • So has it finally happened – a DM whose thesis/dissertation is directly related more or less to some aspect of the game play at the game table (and other than statistics). Research then benefits both endeavors perhaps in a never ending cycle. Well done.

  3. Very cool! Long time ago I wrote a whole series of posts merging my social science work on disgust with literary analysis and gaming situations. You can start with the 30 May one and follow in order …

    http://rolesrules.blogspot.com/search?q=disgust

    • Bearded-Devil

      Oh wow! These are really interesting posts. I wonder if I read some of your academic work at some point! The Hodgson stuff on your blog in particular is great – I have a chapter on Hodgson in the book focused on (surprise, surprise) fungi and pigs. I actually really, really like the pig as a cosmic horror monster – it’s less alien than the squid/insect monster for sure, but its proximity to human beings heightens the threat of contamination, the reminder of our own gross corporeality… definitely runs the risk of being humourous, though I think horror/humour are pretty close a lot of the time, as people like Bakhtin might suggest.

  4. Caz

    The cost is rather steep, to a poor working class schmuck such as myself. Do you know if any libraries will be ordering a copy that we could read via interlibrary loan ?

    • Bearded-Devil

      The cost is indeed high – an unfortunate necessity for academic publishers, as a rule. If I find out about a specific library that has a copy I’ll update this post. I’ve suggested thatthe University of British Columbia library acquire a copy, and hopefully others will as well. My guess is that it will probably take a few months at minimum – U of Chicao Press in particular is a bit tied up at the moment – but when I learn more I will definitely let blog-readers know.

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