This thing has been out since March, and it’s now listed in the Weekly Book List for May 20 in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The Age of Lovecraft edited by Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (University of Minnesota Press; 256 pages; $87.50 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Essays on the thought and writings of H.P. Lovecraft in the context of 21st-century culture and theory; topics include abjection and the monstrous feminine in “The Dunwich Horror.”
The Collection consists of eleven essays, an introduction, an afterword in the form of an interview with the execrable China Miéville, and a foreword by none other than Ramsey Campbell. I fear Campbell’s contribution will be the only thing worth reading here, and I say this as a result of long and bitter exposure to earlier volumes of this sort. It is a sad and lamentable fact that Academic literary “theory” and criticism has been little more than a very bad joke since at least as far back as the early 20th century (things started going downhill ever since Modernism and New Criticism, and went completely into the toilet with postmodernist insanities like poststructuralism and deconstruction after the 1960s). So most likely this will be the usual uninformed and ignorant nonsense, written in agonizingly leaden and pompous academese – but of course I could be wrong. I won’t know for sure until I’ve gotten hold of a copy and made myself plod through it. Lucky me.
This post first appeared on The Scrawl Of Cthulhu – A Compendium Of Random O, please read the originial post: here
