At home in a racist universe

Often credited as the innovative father of the weird subgenre, H.P. Lovecraft produced a body of work inextricable from the tension found in his anxious and racist conviction that racial difference was a fundamental cosmic force, confronting a vast universe that promised no victory for the white race. His story, “The Dunwich Horror,” presents race as a formative structure in society and as an experience of phenomenological difference, and an uncanny alterity modelled in the home and present across the cosmos. Lovecraft conceives of race as a kind of anti-sublime, cosmic differentiation, which expresses itself in, but is not limited to, the body. In Lovecraft’s hands, these ideas are mobilised toward deeply reactionary ends. However, readers, unwilling to excuse the author’s abhorrent racist views, have begun to use his own aesthetics and generic innovations against him. Because Lovecraft’s racist themes are so overt, yet so ambivalent, so anxious, there remains potential to use the ideas to challenge the mindset proposing them

Alterity · COSMIC cancer database · Lived experience · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Thomas Hardy Literature Studies