This dissertation examines select writings from H.P. Lovecraft and a group of contemporary authors of weird fiction in the context of a wake, a term defined in two precise ways. The first meaning of “wake” refers to an influential disturbance in the history of weird fiction left by Lovecraft’s writings, a seismic shift at the level of what the genre represents and the kinds of questions it asks. The second definition of “wake” refers to the fact that someone (or something) has passed, and we, the living, attend a wake to acknowledge this passing. With these two definitions in hand, the project argues that a group of contemporary weird fiction authors are writing in and at Lovecraft’s wake. Put differently, certain aspects of his fictional corpus have been revised by a group of contemporary weird fiction authors such that we can, on the one hand, acknowledge Lovecraft’s undeniable influence and the notion that to compose weird fiction in the present is to find one’s self always already writing in Lovecraft’s wake, and, on the other, to move beyond both some of the more dated questions his writing raises as well as the blatantly racist elements of some of his writing(s). Additionally, the contemporary weird authors examined in this project frame different manifestations of pessimism as a worldview that remains contingent, not on an indifferent cosmos, but on human communities in doomed worlds and the horrors that they inflict on each other in that context. In sum, the authors writing in and at Lovecraft’s wake want us not to combat the persistence of pessimism but rather to learn to accept it such that we can live with others in the fundamentally finite time allotted to each of us in a more peaceful way.
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