Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1 - Couverture souple

Joshi, S T

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 161498090X ISBN 13 : 9781614980902

Editeur : Hippocampus Press, 2014

Synopsis

S. T. Joshi is one of the leading authorities on weird fiction, and in this expansive new study he provides a comprehensive history and analysis of the entire range of weird fiction from antiquity to the present day. This first volume focuses on weird fiction from the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1700 B.C.E.) to the end of the nineteenth century. Joshi focuses on key works of Greek and Latin literature that introduced many long-enduring motifs in weird literature. Moving on down through Dante, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton, Joshi provides a compact overview of the several different strands of Gothic fiction, beginning with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and culminating with Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), with detailed discussions of Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, Mary Shelley, and others. Edgar Allan Poe was a watershed in the history of weird fiction, and his fusion of psychological and supernatural horror was pioneering. He was followed by the prolific Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu, numerous practitioners of the English ghost story (including Henry James and Edith Wharton), and the cynical Ambrose Bierce. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and others made weird fiction a genre that fused popular appeal with aesthetic richness.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

A strictly personal no holds barred overview of the horror field by one of its most respected--and fiercest--critics. This book was many years in the making. I ve been reading horror fiction pretty constantly since I was at least 10 years old, and have been a scholar in the field since I was about 17 (focusing initially on H. P. Lovecraft). UNUTTERABLE HORROR was the product of five years of solid work, and the book comes to a total of 312,000 words. It covers the entire range of supernatural and non-supernatural horror fiction from the Gilgamesh (1700 B.C.) to such contemporary writers as Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron. Along the way I discuss the Gothic novel, Edgar Allan Poe, the Victorian ghost story, Ambrose Bierce, the five titans of the early 20th century (Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), Walter de la Mare, American pulp writers from Robert Bloch to Ray Bradbury, the horror boom of the 1970s and 1980s (William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Anne Rice), and many others. This book is intended not only as a history of the field but a guide to the best writing in the field over the past two or three centuries.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Hippocampus Press
• Date d'édition: 2014
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 161498090X
• ISBN 13: 9781614980902
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 374
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne