H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West
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The author writes: This book began as an expansion of my essay¸ "H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West¸" in The Weird Tale¸ but very quickly became something quite different¸ to the degree that the two works have little save the title in common. I have always been interested in Lovecraft the philosopher¸ and in my Starmont Reader's Guide to Lovecraft (1982) I attempted a very compressed account of his philosophical views. To treat so complex a thinker as Lovecraft in a few pages was obviously untenable¸ even though I think those few pages at least convey the unity of his thought -- perhaps better than this fuller study does. One reviewer¸ however¸ was correct in noting that I did not sufficiently integrate Lovecraft's thought and his fiction¸ and I have now attempted to remedy the failing. I am still not convinced that I have really written one rather than two books here. Does Lovecraft's fiction really depend upon his philosophy? I wrestle with this question further in my introduction¸ but here I can note that I had great difficulty deciding upon the proper structure for this book. I deal with four principal facets of Lovecraft's philosophy -- metaphysics¸ ethics¸ aesthetics¸ and politics -- in Part I¸ and those same facets as applied to the fiction in Part II. It might have made more sense to juxtapose the corresponding chapters of each part¸ but I finally determined that this would be both methodologically and practically unsound; methodologically for reasons explained in the introduction¸ and practically because it would fail to demonstrate the interconnectedness of Lovecraft's thought and because in Part II I frequently rely upon conceptions expressed throughout the whole of Part I. In Part I¸ the author deals with four principal facets of Lovecraft's philosophy: metaphysics¸ ethics¸ aesthetics¸ and politics. In Part II¸ he studies those same facets as applied to the fiction. This digital edition includes the PDF¸ EPUB and MOBI (Kindle) versions of the book.