Wow! Just blown away by the kind of invective being drawn out from some sectors of fandom by any attempts at talking about Lovecrafts racism (let alone criticising it)! Raising the spectre of this is tantamount to declaring oneself as raving pinko-commie-liberal with the term political correctness being used as a perjorative. Stewart Lee - a fan of Machen AND Robert E. Howard - has some interesting thoughts on this latter point (which interestingly mirror some of my childhood experiences): m.youtube/watch?v=1IYx4Bc6_eE In any case, what an apparently significant sector of Lovecraft fandom feels is that HPLs racism is something that has been dealt with and no longer needs to be talked about - despite the comparative lack of any substantive essays on this in many of the classic core collections of Lovecraft criticism (specifically those which predate more recent studies coming from within academia). But then, recently, a notable Lovecraft scholar (and one who has been at least partially critical of the product of his time argument) has seemingly quantified the actual amount of racism in Lovecrafts writings as indicative of its relative unimportance with regard to other aspects of his life and philosophy. I feel a blog post coming on...
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 10:23:58 +0000