This book is the first study of how 'weird fiction' emerged from Victorian supernatural literature, abandoning the more conventional Gothic horrors of the past for the contemporary weird tale. It investigates the careers and fiction of a range of the British writers who inspired H. P. Lovecraft, such as Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, and John Buchan, to shed light on the tensions between 'literary' and 'genre' fiction that continue to this day. Weird Fiction in Britain 18801939 focuses on the key literary and cultural contexts of weird fiction of the period, including Decadence, paganism, and the occult, and discusses how these later impacted on the seminal American pulp magazine Weird Tales . This ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars of weird, horror and Gothic fiction, genre studies, Decadence, popular fiction, the occult, and Fin-de-Siècle cultural history.

Constitutes the first cultural history of weird fiction from a British perspective Demonstrates how weird fiction didn't start in America with H. P. Lovecraft; it has a far longer and 'weirder' history Uses a combination of cultural history, archival research, and literary criticism to excavate weird fiction's complex historical lineage, re-examining its relationship with Modernism

Autorentext

James Machin is a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, UK.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. The Weird Fin-De-Siècle and After.- 3. Shiel, Stenbock, Gilchrist, and Machen.- 4. Buchan.- 5. Weird Tales and Pulp Decadence.