A CENTURY OF
Weird Fiction
1832–1937
HORROR STUDIES
Series Editor
Xavier Aldana Reyes, Manchester Metropolitan University
Editorial Board
Stacey Abbott, Roehampton University
Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas
Linnie Blake, Manchester Metropolitan University
Fred Botting, Kingston University
Steven Bruhm, Western University
Steffen Hantke, Sogang University
Joan Hawkins, Indiana University
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne
Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin
Johnny Walker, Northumbria University
Preface
Horror Studies is the first book series exclusively dedicated to the study of the genre in its various manifestations – from fiction to cinema and television, magazines to comics, and extending to other forms of narrative texts such as video games and music. Horror Studies aims to raise the profile of Horror and to further its academic institutionalisation by providing a publishing home for cutting-edge research. As an exciting new venture within the established Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism programme, Horror Studies will expand the field in innovative and student-friendly ways.
A CENTURY OF
Weird Fiction
1832–1937
DISGUST, METAPHYSICS AND THE AESTHETICS OF COSMIC HORROR
JONATHAN NEWELL
© Jonathan Newell, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-544-4
eISBN 978-1-78683-546-8
The right of Jonathan Newell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image: Max Ernst, Solitary and Conjugal Trees (1940), oil on canvas. By permission, Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo.
To Alli, who brightens even the depths of unplumbed space.
Contents
6. Daemonology of Unplumbed Space
I WOULD LIKE to offer tremendous gratitude to Dr Sandra Tomc, whose patience, insightful advice, good humour and superb mentorship were invaluable in navigating the murky and pitfall-riddled terrain of weird scholarship. Her guidance and unflagging cheerfulness helped sustain this project and its author through periods of puzzlement and doubt that sometimes seemed equal to the horrors of an unknowable cosmos. Dr Adam Frank and Dr Suzy Anger were similarly indispensable, asking perceptive and intellectually enriching questions no less consciousness- expanding than the musings of the German idealists or speculative realists.
I would also like to thank a number of colleagues in the English Department at UBC whose intellectual (and personal) generosity have profoundly shaped my scholarship and, indeed, my life: Dr Tiffany Potter, Dr Siân Echard, Dr Stephen Guy-Bray, Dr Elizabeth Hodgson and Dr Margery Fee. Special thanks also to my colleagues in the International Gothic Association for their friendship, expertise and encouragement, especially Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley and Dr Neil Kirk.
In addition, I offer enormous thanks to my parents, David and Shaaron Newell, whose dauntless encouragement led me not only into graduate studies but to English literature in the first place, as well as to my brothers, Benjamin and Simon Newell. Finally, special and inestimable thanks are owed to my wife, Allison Sullivan, who has put up with mountains of books and endless talk of tentacular monsters, and whose wit, wisdom and warmth are truly and continuously astonishing. Without her support, love and confidence, this book would not exist.
IN H. P. LOVECRAFT’S short story ‘Cool Air’ (1928), the nameless narrator moves