scholarly journals Altar Call of Cthulhu: Religion and Millennialism in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Benjamin E. Zeller
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
Altar Call ◽  
Formative Experiences

Religion suffuses H.P. Lovecraft’s (1890–1937) short stories—the most famous of which, “The Call of Cthulhu,” has led to a literary subculture and a shared mythos employed by Lovecraft’s successors. Despite this presence of religion in Lovecraft’s work, scholars of religion have paid relatively little attention to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos, with a few notable exceptions. This article offers a close analysis of millennialism within Lovecraft’s thought, especially as expressed in three of his “Cthulhu mythos” stories: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” This article considers Lovecraft’s formative experiences and non-fiction writings so as to contextualize his approach and millennial outlook. Tied to his nativist views of social decline, I argue that Lovecraft expresses in his fiction a peculiar form of millennialism, “anti-millennialism,” which entails the reversal of traditional millennialism, offering no hope in a collective salvation, but rather expectation that the imminent future would bring only decline.

scholarly journals In conversation with Catherine Cole

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaydeep Sarangi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Sea Birds ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Dry Dock

Catherine Cole is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. In March 2017, she will take up the position of Professor in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, UK. Catherine has published three novels, Dry Dock (1999) and Skin Deep (2002) and The Grave at Thu Le (2006), two non-fiction books, Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction (1996) and The Poet Who Forgot (2008). She is the editor of the anthology, The Perfume River: Writing from Vietnam (2010) and co-editor with McNeil and Karaminas of Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television (2009). Her poetry, short stories, essays and reviews have been published in Australia and internationally and produced by BBC Radio 4. In 2017 Catherine’s short story collection, Sea Birds Crying in the Harbour Dark, will be published by UWA Press.

Warner, Sylvia Townsend (1893–1978)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Suh
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
International Association ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
The Other ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Sylvia Townsend Warner ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Lifelong Partner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was the author of novels, short stories, poetry, journalistic non-fiction, and literary criticism. Her works often inhabit settings at opposite ends of the modernist-era spectrum: on one hand, fantasy and fable worlds, and on the other, detailed contemporary domestic and historical settings incorporating themes of war, revolution, and class struggle. Warner is regarded as a pioneer of anti-colonial, LGBT, Marxist, and anti-fascist narrative, particularly in her novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Warner was born and raised in Harrow, Middlesex, England, where her father was schoolmaster at the boys’ public school. She resided in London between 1917 and 1927 to work as a musicologist and editor on the Carnegie UK Trust’s Tudor Church Music Research Project. In 1926, she met her lifelong partner, Valentine Ackland, a poet and writer in her own right, and in 1930 they moved in with each other in Dorset. Both women were committed leftist activists who joined the Communist Party in 1935. In the year, Warner joined the Executive Committee of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture (IAWDC), and in 1936, she served as Secretary of the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty (AWIL); both were anti-fascist organisations. During the war, Warner wrote anti-fascist and Marxist articles for leftist newspapers and magazines, including Time and Tide, the Left Review, the Daily Worker, and Our Time.

Tradition and Hybridity in Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Rosenmeier
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Shi Zhecun ◽  
Mu Shiying

This chapter focuses on the 1930s New Sensationist (xinganjuepai) writers Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, whose works are shown in later chapters to have influenced the subsequent literary scene. They are seen here as an avant-garde group that wrote works in opposition to the overall direction of the contemporary literary field. Through close analysis of a number of short stories, the chapter demonstrates how these authors constructed hybrid works that incorporated tropes and stereotypes from popular literature, legend, tradition, literature and myth. By combining the real with the otherworldly and the imagined, these authors rejected realism and the politicisation of literature promoted at the time by the League of Left-wing Writers. The chapter also establishes aspects of these writers’ works that are used for later comparison.

scholarly journals In Dialogue with Writing. Clare Boylan’s Non-Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 42-53
Author(s):  
Giovanna Tallone
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Interesting Insight ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Kate O'brien ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Newspaper Articles

In 1993 Clare Boylan edited a collection of essays by diverse writers on the act of writing entitled The Agony and the Ego. The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored. Here, Boylan takes the double stance of an outsider, as a critic, and of an insider, as a writer, and her concern with other writers’ work highlights her own preoccupation with writing and creativity, thus providing an interesting insight into her own fiction too. Besides writing seven novels and three collections of short stories, Clare Boylan also produced personal, autobiographical and critical pieces in a variety of essays and newspaper articles. She also showed a rigorous stance as editor in the thorough and engaging Literary Companion to Cats (1994). In particular, Boylan’s non-fiction work includes essays on Kate O’Brien and Molly Keane, as well as an introduction to Maeve Brennan’s posthumous novella The Visitor. Her critical work shows rigorous attention to texts and imagery, but also patterns of affinities with the writers she takes into account. The purpose of this essay is to analyse samples of Clare Boylan’s critical work vis-à-vis her own fiction. Significant cross-references can be identified which cast new perspectives on her literary work.

Tom McCarthy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Lea
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Digital Convergence ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Technological Sublime

This chapter explores the writing of Tom McCarthy and situates him as one of the exciting experimental voices of contemporary British writing that is seeking to explore the limits and tolerances of the realistic. The chapter situates McCarthy within the notion of the contemporary avant-garde novel and contextualises his fictional writing alongside his non-fiction and his work as a conceptual artist. This is followed by close analysis of his fiction up to Satin Island (2015). McCarthy’s writing absorbs the cultural novelty of digital convergence, channelling the technological sublime of the 21st century back into the shell of the realist novel to examine the extent to which it any longer has representational credibility.

Stopped Clocks

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-103
Author(s):  
Beryl Pong
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Frank Kermode

Chapter 3 begins by examining a prominent trope in photographs of the home front: the stopped clock. Unpacking the manifold, often competing, meanings of this image—by turns denoting suspension and dislocation, but also temporal resilience and transcendence—it underscores how the photographic medium corroborates or problematizes the temporalities portrayed within its frames. The chapter then turns to the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen and William Sansom, both of whom variously conceived of their own writing as ‘photographic’. Rendering a temporality somewhere between what Frank Kermode, in narratological terms, called ‘tick-tock’ and ‘tock-tick’, Bowen’s and Sansom’s fragmented short stories blended fiction with non-fiction, and were ultimately anthologized as ‘records’ of the war.

scholarly journals Museum: The Macleays, Their Collections and the Search for Order.

2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 162
Author(s):  
Graham R Fulton
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Botanic Gardens ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Aesthetic Appeal ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Royal Botanic Gardens ◽  
Coffee Table ◽  
The University ◽  
Open The Doors

STACEY and Hay have previously collaborated on the volume Herbarium (Stacey and Hay 2004) regarding collections held in the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. Ashley Hay has published two books of narrative non-fiction. Her essays, short stories and journalism have appeared in various periodicals including The Bulletin where she was a literary editor. Robyn Stacey is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Western Sydney. She is an acclaimed photographer, in Australia, with her photography shown in Australia and internationally. This book is about the history, collectors and collections of The Macleay Museum at The University of Sydney. Its aim is to bring the reader closer to the collectors and collections by breathing life into the characters and selected specimens in the collection; according to the dust-jacket’s hyperbole, to throw open the doors of the museum and its rich collections. The authors develop the book with their individual skills, one of writing and one of photography. The second is facilitated through its aesthetic appeal, its folio size and large photographic reproductions of strikingly coloured specimens. The whole is a coffee-table-style-book with a text that digs deeper developing the background to the personalities and collections, intertwining them with the history of early systematists/collectors, which provides the backbone of the text.

scholarly journals ‘Time writes its own script ...’ A Conversation with Sharmila Ray.

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaydeep Sarangi
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
South Asian ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
British Council ◽  
City College ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Ben Okri

Sharmila Ray is an Indian poet and non-fiction essayist writing in English, anthologised and featured in India and abroad. Her poems, short stories and non-fictional essays have appeared in various national and international magazines and journals since the late 1990s. She is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History at City College, Kolkata. She was on the English Board of Sahitya Akademi. She was the editor of The Journal (Poetry Society India) and looked after a column ‘Moving Hand Writes’, Times of India, Kolkata. Currently she is the vice-president of the Intercultural Poetry Performance Library, Kolkata and a Board Member of the Poetry Society India. She writes in English and has authored nine books of poetry (listed below). She also writes on Partition and her articles have been published in Bengal Past and Present and Glimpses of Partition in South Asian Fiction: A Critical Re-Interpretation, edited by Farzana S. Ali. She has conducted poetry workshops organized by British Council, the Poetry Society of India and Sahitya Akademi. She has read her poems at various poetry festivals in India. She had been invited to International Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia, where she represented India, and International Poets Meet in Kerala to share the stage with Ben Okri. She was the only poet writing in English from West Bengal to participate in VAK –the first poetry biennial held in New Delhi (2017). Her poems have been translated into Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Manipuri, Slovene, Hebrew and Spanish. Currently she is working on a manuscript of non-fictional essays and poetry.The interview took place at ICCR, Kolkata during our meeting in the month of April 2018.

scholarly journals E-mails from Scheherazad

1970 ◽  
pp. 65-67
Author(s):  
Sirène Harb
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Web Site ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Creative Non Fiction ◽  
The Web ◽  
Poetry Collection

In her poetry, Mohja Kahf skillfully weaves details from her lived reality with a global, transnational vision. She challenges stereotypes about Muslim women, the Arab world, America, and the Middle East, in a style marked by humor, anger, and confrontation. In addition to her poetry collection,E-mails from Scheherazad, Kahf is the author of one novel, short stories, creative non-fiction,essays, and literary criticism. Kahf also contributes poems and essays to the web site MuslimWakeUp!

scholarly journals All the Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor and New Zealand

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Bluemel
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Non Fiction

If you type the name Greville Texidor into a Wikipedia search bar, you may be asked if you mean instead ‘grevillea teodor’. Alternatively, you’ll be redirected to biographical websites for Maurice Duggan, one of postwar New Zealand’s most famous short story writers, or Kendrick Smithyman, editor of Greville Texidor’s volume of selected fiction, In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot. To learn anything about Greville Texidor herself, you need to read All the Juicy Pastures: Greville Texidor and New Zealand, by Wellington-based writer Margot Schwass. Beautifully written, deeply researched, richly illustrated, this critical biography addresses the question of why we should care about the career of a woman writer born in England in 1902, who died by her own hand in Australia in 1964, and who in her lifetime published only seven short stories, a post- Spanish Civil War novella called These Dark Glasses, a few translations of Lorca poems, and a smattering of other non-fiction pieces. Schwass also tackles the question of why we should care about Greville Texidor as a New Zealand writer.

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