Literary Biography and Psychological Criticism

L. Sprague de Camp. Lovecraft: A Biography. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976. 480 pp. (Abridgement of the first edition, Doubleday, 1975). Frank Belknap Long. Howard Philips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1975. 237 + xiv pp. Barton Levi St. Armand. The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Elizabethtown, N.Y.: Dragon Press, 1977. 102 + viii pp. Psychological criticism, we can't get away from it, any more than we can avoid psychiatric ideas when we try to understand the people we know. Psycho- logical notions pervade our language and the assumptions beneath our views of the world. I think that one can hardly pick up a twentieth-century book about literature that is not psychological, although no great number set out to be so, and fewer still are well informed psychologically. A few literary scholars have troubled themselves to undertake disciplined psychological study, and to publish scholarly work that reflects the discipline. Yet such study in itself cannot guarantee an account of a literary work or an author that makes one exclaim, "Now I understand! Now I know what I was feeling and thinking!" It is as easy to intellectualize the blood and guts out of a story or author with psychological ideas as with, say, philosophical ideas. Having a bias in favor of scholarship that gives me a sense of the humanly credible, as well as several years of formal training in the discipline of psychoanalysis, I find myself evaluating literary studies as follows: if psychological thinking does or should play a significant role in the understanding of the scholar's subject, then the reader may rightfully expect the scholar to behave respon- sibly in his use of psychology or in his rejection of psychological explanation

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