H.P. Lovecraft's weird tale ideal: Angela Carter's new weird dystopia

H.P. Lovecraft's weird tale ideal: Angela Carter's new weird dystopia

This paper critiques whether H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Weird standards remain relevant to the ways in which women writing the New Weird resist and/or transform the Lovecraftian weird tale ideal. Lovecraft explains that there must be particular attention taken in order to achieve the great desideratum of Weird Fiction: Lovecraftian aura of cosmic horror achieves the strange reality of the unreal. This elevation of Lovecraft has produced a scholarship that tends to discuss an Old canon exclusively authored by men, silencing the work of women writers within the genre, and sidelining women’s dystopias as examples of masculine authority and fear. The aim of this discussion is to identify women’s grotesque bodies within the New as depicted by Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). Through this, I aim to reveal how women writers are rewriting Old phallogocentrism in a way that achieves generating a critical and creative feminist dystopia.

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