Introduction: Weird Tales—Discourse Community and Genre Nexus
(Justin Everett and Jeffrey Shanks)
PART I: THE UNIQUE MAGAZINE: WEIRD TALES, MODERNISM, AND GENRE
FORMATION
Chapter 1: "Something that swayed as if in unison": The Artistic
Authenticity of Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of
Modernism - Jason Ray Carney
Chapter 2: Weird Modernism: Literary Modernism in the First Decade
of Weird Tales - Jonas Prida
Chapter 3: “Against the Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller”:
The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class” - Daniel Nyikos
Chapter 4: Strange Collaborations: Shared Authorship and Weird
Tales - Nicole Emmelhainz
Chapter 5: Gothic to Cosmic: Sword and Sorcery Fiction in Weird
Tales - Morgan Holmes
II. EICH-PI-EL AND TWO-GUN BOB: LOVECRAFT AND HOWARD IN WEIRD
TALES
Chapter 6: A Nameless Horror: Madness and Metamorphosis in H.P.
Lovecraft and Post-modernism - Clancy Smith
Chapter 7: Great Phallic Monoliths: Lovecraft and Sexuality - Bobby
Derie
Chapter 8: Evolutionary Otherness: Anthropological Anxiety in
Robert E. Howard’s “Worms of the Earth” - Jeffrey Shanks
Chapter 9: Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard -
Justin Everett
III. MASTERS OF THE WEIRD: OTHER AUTHORS OF WEIRD TALES
Chapter 10: Pegasus Unbridled: Clark Ashton Smith and the
Ghettoization of the Fantastic - Scott Connors
Chapter 11: “A Round Cipher”: Word-Building and World-Building in
the Weird Works of Clark Ashton Smith - Geoffrey Reiter
Chapter 12: C. L. Moore and M. Brundage: Competing Femininities in
the October, 1934 Issue of Weird Tales - Jonathan Helland
Chapter 13: Psycho-ology 101: Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales
of Robert Bloch - Paul Shovlin
Chapter 14: “To Hell and Gone”: Harold Lawlor’s Self-Effacing Pulp
Metafiction - Sidney Sondergard
Index
About the Editors and Contributors
Justin Everett is associate professor and Director of Writing
Programs at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and the
coauthor of Dynamic Argument (2012). Everett created the Pulp
Studies area for the Popular Culture Association and serves as its
co-chair.
Jeffrey Shanks is an archaeologist with the National Park Service
whose research interests include the use of anthropological and
sociological themes in early 20th century pulp fiction. He has
authored a number of popular and scholarly articles on Robert E.
Howard, including recent essays in Conan Meets the Academy (2012),
Pulp Fiction of the 20s and 30s (2013), and Undead in the West II
(Scarecrow Press, 2013).
Everett and Shanks provide a challenging, provocative collection of
essays on the legacy and importance of Weird Tales magazine,
particularly from its inception in 1923 to the end of the 1930s,
when other magazines (e.g., Unknown) stole some of its thunder by
paying higher rates to authors for similar stories. The editors
view the magazine as a discourse community—‘a unique and tightly
knit community of editors, readers, illustrators, and writers,’ as
they write in their introduction—and they place the magazine in
relation (and opposition) to literary modernism at the height of
its influence. H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard receive the
lion’s share of attention (5 of the 14 essays treat their work at
length), but other important writers are covered, including C. L.
Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Bloch. The little-known
author Harold Lawlor, whose work was never collected in book form,
receives much-needed attention from Sidney Sondergard, who plucks
this writer’s reputation from obscurity. The letters column the
magazine published is also taken seriously, with its swirling
controversy over what ‘weird fiction’ actually meant. No
bibliography, but extensive notes make up for that. Summing Up:
Recommended. All readers.
*CHOICE*
The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales . . . [is] a fascinating
collection of essays. . . .This is a great volume for anyone who
wants to understand why Weird Tales was so crucially important to
the development of American fantasy, and the fan who’s just looking
for recommendations on the best fantasy from the early Twentieth
Century.
*Black Gate*
This volume was faithfully strong throughout. . . .[This book] is
very much worth it if you are interested in delving into critical
secondary works about some of the greatest popular (pulp) fiction
writers of the early to mid-20th century. I highly recommend
it!
*On an Underwood No. 5*
The collection’s greatest collective strength is in the brilliant
moments when individual contributors place Weird Tales in
conversation with scholarship on American pulp magazines.... Unique
Legacy as a whole offers an important meditation on the
literariness of the pulps, their place in interwar modernism and
periodical culture, and much on the significance of Lovecraft and
Howard.
*The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts*
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