ipl-logo

Lovecraft Research Paper

1259 Words6 Pages

In this part of the essay, Lovecraft explains the origins of horror in the history of horror literature. Horror is one of the most old things in the world, it is as old as speech and it appears in the folklore of all races (Lovecraft, 1927). Lovecraft thought that horror was born in humanity itself, in rituals, demons and spectres, reaching its highest point in Egypt and the semitic nations and influenced by the Book of Enoch and Claviculae of Solomon (Lovecraft, 1927). Then, tales of witches, werewolves, druids, vampires, ghouls, sacrifices and similar thing improved horror during the Middle Ages, with cults and the Gothic ecclesiastic arquitectural style with gargoyles like the ones of Notre Dame and St Michel a bit later. (Lovecraft, 1927). …show more content…

(Lovecraft, 1927). For him, Scandinavian stories are full of horror, with Ymir and his shapeless spawn, then Beowulf and the Nibelung tales are full of eldritch weirdness (Lovecraft, 1927). “Eldritch” is a term that means “weird, ghostly, sinister” and Lovecraft used that term in his stories and even today there is a board game called “Eldritch Horror” based on his books, so it was an important term for Lovecraft. He thinks that in Dante and Spenser we see “the macabre atmosphere” and the horror in the environment, events and characters and in Malory we find the “strange” theft of the sword and silk from a corpse, ghosts and undeads. (Lovecraft, 1927). Lovecraft talks about the witches in Macbeth, and the ghost in Hamlet and those are very important because both of them drive the characters of their stories mad and this is something Lovecraft uses in all of his stories, this kind of horror and madness goes through horror writers until he himself uses it because it has survived. Later on, more horror stories started to appear because of their fame although with rationalism the supernatural element is lost for a while but in the end it survives and continues evolving (Lovecraft, …show more content…

Lovecraft mentions that Walpole knew medieval romance and mystery, and for Lovecraft mystery is present in all his stories so he considers it something really important in a horror story. Walpole is the author of The Castle of Otranto, 1764, a tale with the supernatural element that influenced horror literature. (Lovecraft, 1927). Lovecraft thinks that the story is “tedious, artificial, and melodramatic, with sprightliness that does not permit the creation of a truly weird atmosphere” but there are parts where the supernatural appear in the story: a gigantic armour fragmented all over the place, a portrait leaving his frame, a thunder destroying the place, and a spectre (Lovecraft, 1927). He thinks that the story does not have the required elements to be called weird or horror literature but it was received well (Lovecraft, 1927), and although he criticizes it then he thinks that its scene, characters and events created a standard that could be used by better writers to create a real horror story and this made a real Gothic school appear and grow up (Lovecraft, 1927). Lovecraft says that the most important thing in these stories was the castle. The ruined castle, deserted, catacombs, ghosts and legends of the place, etc, these elements created a sense of fear (Lovecraft, 1927). The evil villain was the nobleman, the hero was of high birth, foreign names, fading lights, traps,

Show More
Related
1227 Words | 5 Pages

Edgar Allen Poe was a mysterious man that exemplified in gothic horror on his short stories and poems. He is best known for his use of dark, eerie, and emotionally haunted characters and elements of the supernatural in American Literature. Although, not much is mentioned from his biography, his subjective like qualities in his short stories captured the public’s attention. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as his nostalgic poetry. The meaning of the lives in his characters all portray an eerie subconscious of the narrator before he commits heinous crimes of premeditated murder.

Read More
1118 Words | 5 Pages

Have you ever read a story that causes chills or your emotionally invested in a character. The story’s Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The mysteries of udolpho by Ann Radcliffe are literature that are centered in fear. These story’s cause suspense or has ghost or some type of monster. A gothic is a great example of fear in literature. The settings, characters, and story line has a way of making the reader invested by hooking to their emotions.

Read More
674 Words | 3 Pages

Without, further ado let’s analyze Edgar Allan Poe’s writing The Tell-Tale Heart. The first horror genre element I noticed in his writing was an internal source of horror.

Read More
592 Words | 3 Pages

Edgar Allan Poe is known in America is the William Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum, which is distinguished by Tony Magistrate in his article “Poe, Edgar Allan 1809-1849” (8). Poe illustrates his characters with unstable minds and the inability to maintain self-control over their darkest urges. His stories are told in the first person by male narrators that make even the hesitant readers thrust into a crazed obsession of the horror stories (Magistrate 8). Poe used supernatural themes to address and to discover social anxieties concerning madness, disease, and death in a psychological version of Gothic literature. According to J. Gerald Kennedy in his book Phantasms of Death in Poe’s Fiction, Poe thought about death and the human soul more than the average person might (128).

Read More
437 Words | 2 Pages

This article will examine how H.P. Lovecraft creates suspense using Narrator’s point of view and sensory language. I will be showing how the literary devices create suspense by using quotes and explaining the reasons why they create suspense. Understanding suspense and literary devices can help us read and understand the story. “Pickman’s Model” By H.P. Lovecraft tells

Read More
375 Words | 2 Pages

In the story “The Boogeyman” by Stephen King, King shows multiple elements of gothic literature such as supernatural beings, monsters or phantoms, intense emotions, gloomy setting and a damsel in distress. Supernatural beings/monsters is the main part of the story, as it is about the boogeyman which is some monster with big claws that hides in closets, waiting to slither out and take its next victim. “I could see something with awful slumped shoulders and a scarecrow head” is how Billings described it when he confronted it. The story is filled with intense emotions when billings recalls the killings of his kids. “Billings's voice had become a high treble, like a child's.

Read More
1803 Words | 8 Pages

H.P Lovecraft likes to write about science fiction and mythology. Most of his pieces have mythological creatures that he either makes up or learns about from other cultures. In “The Dunwich Horror” he uses characterization to build up the suspense and views from each character. He also uses setting to create an erie environment to develop the themes of the story. Lastly, Lovecraft creates a theme of the terror that occurs throughout the whole town of Dunwich.

Read More
3460 Words | 14 Pages

Cedric Wysocki Mr. Doucet English III Gothic 4/28/23 Of Obscurity and Knowledge When analyzing H.P. Lovecraft's compilation of stories The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, it can be seen that Lovecraft ties the human condition of fear to our limited understanding of our world and the obscurity of what exists outside of it. By applying the scholarship of Bradley A. Will in his essay, H.P. Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime, and Patricia MacCormack’s essay, Posthuman Teratology, to H.P. Lovecraft's The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories it becomes transparent that the opaqueness of the worlds of Lovecraft tie into the human capacity for understanding and how fear can exist from what we cannot understand. Although

Read More
813 Words | 4 Pages

H.P. Lovecraft, a renowned author in the genre of horror fiction once spoke on the subject of fear and remarked, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” In his short story The Blue Hotel, Stephen Crane tells the story of a nervous Swede who visits the American west for the first time, which he assumes to be a dangerous place. The Swede’s paranoia, the constraints of society’s rules, and the lack of interference from the other characters culminate together and lead to the murder of the Swede. In The Blue Hotel, Stephen Crane asserts that the inherent fear in all humans is the cause of violence, and portrays his beliefs using characterization.

Read More
1497 Words | 6 Pages

Fear plays a big part in everyone’s lives. While not everyone will admit it, everyone is scared of something. There is a lot that isn’t known about the world and everything in it. For some this is a tool that can be used to develop horror in literature as well as many other things. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Read More
772 Words | 4 Pages

Firstly, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Mystifications of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe are two Gothic novels that probe the theme of fear. Both novels

Read More
1027 Words | 5 Pages

It’s Better to Have Lovecraft and Lost For what he lacked in prominence during his lifetime, Lovecraft more than made up for it in the strength of his legacy. His influence is still present in fiction today long after his death. He has a huge fanbase that has produced numerous works based on the worlds and creatures that he created. Highly celebrated, Lovecraft’s style of archaic language, disturbing imagery, and mythos made him one of the most influential authors of horror despite his lack of success while he was alive. Lovecraft had a tough time selling his fears to readers.

Read More
472 Words | 2 Pages

Born in Providence in 1890 H.P. Lovecraft is nowadays regarded as a major figure on horror literature; Nevertheless, as many different writers before, Lovecraft's work was mostly ignored during his lifetime. His work is inspired by Gothic writers such as Poe, as well as many other fantastic tales like the Arabian nights, the Odyssey and many other important works which he read as a child. He was considered to be a misanthropic and distant person with a troubled personality, as many of his works seem to suggest. In fact, most of the creatures he imagined are “a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive” as he himself writes in The call of Cthulhu (Lovecraft 1926: 2).

Read More
1053 Words | 5 Pages

It is used to make the story become more real, and easier for the reader to place himself in the story, and feel the same way as the characters. Stephen King is using the terror effect throughout the whole story. He is making the feeling of dread and anticipation the main factors in the horrifying experience. He also uses the horror effect, when he is writing about The Boogeyman, but he leaves out the gross out part. Edgar Allan Poe is in the same way using both terror and horror to give the reader the most horrifying experience.

Read More
638 Words | 3 Pages

The story portrays a lot of anger, greed, and fear. Edgar Allan Poe used these forms of nature to show that although nobody is perfect, they most important thing is to do the right thing, be kind, and courageous no matter what. By using supernatural, gloom and horror, revenge, and a castle this was the perfect setting for the horror story it became, using this to show that it is some humans nature to be selfish, fearful, or powerful made readers understand the importance of the message Poe was trying to depict. Always doing the right

Read More

More about Lovecraft Research Paper

Open Document