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Weird fiction

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Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves.<ref name="cm" /><ref name="jaw" /><ref name=weirdfictionintro>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European Gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.<ref name="cm" /><ref name=weirdfictionintro />

Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations, causing commentators like Miéville to paraphrase Goethe in saying that weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous.<ref name="cm" /> Although "weird fiction" has been chiefly used as a historical description for works through the 1930s, it experienced a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, under the label of New Weird, which continues into the 21st century.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

DefinitionsEdit

John Clute defines weird fiction as a term "used loosely to describe fantasy, supernatural fiction and horror tales embodying transgressive material".<ref name="eof">John Clute, "Weird Fiction Template:Webarchive", in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 1997. Retrieved 29 September 2018.</ref> China Miéville defines it as "usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic ('horror' plus 'fantasy') often featuring nontraditional alien monsters (thus plus 'science fiction')".<ref name="cm">China Miéville, "Weird Fiction", in Bould, Mark et al., The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2009, p. 510–516. Template:ISBN</ref> Discussing the "Old Weird Fiction" published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock says, "Old Weird fiction utilises elements of horror, science fiction and fantasy to showcase the impotence and insignificance of human beings within a much larger universe populated by often malign powers and forces that greatly exceed the human capacities to understand or control them."<ref name="jaw">Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, "The New Weird", in Ken Gelder, New Directions in Popular Fiction: genre, reproduction, distribution. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 177–200. Template:ISBN</ref>

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer describe weird fiction not as a genre of fiction, but rather as a mode of literature (i.e. a style or mood) usually appearing within the horror fiction genre.<ref>James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880-1939, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 4, 12-14. Template:ISBN</ref>

HistoryEdit

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M. R. James, Template:Circa
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H. P. Lovecraft, pictured in 1934

Although the term "weird fiction" did not appear until the 20th century, Edgar Allan Poe is often regarded as the pioneering author of weird fiction. Poe was identified by Lovecraft as the first author of a distinct type of supernatural fiction different from traditional Gothic literature, and later commentators on the term have also suggested Poe was the first "weird fiction" writer.<ref name="cm" /><ref name="jaw" /> Sheridan Le Fanu is also seen as an early writer working in the sub-genre.<ref name="cm" />

Literary critics in the nineteenth century would sometimes use the term "weird" to describe supernatural fiction. For instance, the Scottish Review in an 1859 article praised Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Walter Scott by saying the three writers had the "power of weird imagination".<ref>Machin, p. 22</ref> The Irish magazine The Freeman's Journal, in an 1898 review of Dracula by Bram Stoker, described the novel as "wild and weird" and not Gothic.<ref>Machin, p. 14</ref> Weinstock has suggested there was a period of "Old Weird Fiction" that lasted from the late 19th to early 20th centuries.<ref name="jaw" /> S. T. Joshi and Miéville have both argued that there was a period of "Haute Weird" between 1880 and 1940, when authors important to Weird Fiction, such as Arthur Machen and Clark Ashton Smith were publishing their work.<ref name="cm" /><ref name="jaw" />

In the late nineteenth century, a number of British writers associated with the Decadent movement wrote what was later described as weird fiction. These writers included Machen, M. P. Shiel, Count Eric Stenbock, and R. Murray Gilchrist.<ref>Machin, p. 78</ref> Other pioneering British weird fiction writers included Algernon Blackwood,<ref name=Joshi1>Template:Cite book</ref> William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany,<ref>Joshi 1990, p. 42</ref> Arthur Machen,<ref>Joshi 1990, p. 12</ref> and M. R. James.<ref>Joshi 1990, p. 133</ref>

The American pulp magazine Weird Tales published many such stories in the United States from March 1923 to September 1954. The magazine's editor Farnsworth Wright often used the term "weird fiction" to describe the type of material that the magazine published.<ref>Machin, p. 222-5</ref> The writers who wrote for the magazine Weird Tales are thus closely identified with the weird fiction subgenre, especially H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch.<ref name="cm" /> Other pulp magazines that published weird fiction included Strange Tales (edited by Harry Bates),<ref>"Bates had an affinity for weird fiction, but Strange Tales didn't go in for Lovecraft's brooding, wordy atmospherics." Ed Hulse, The Blood 'n' Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction. Murania Press, Morris Plains, New Jersey, 2018, pp. 130–131. Template:ISBN</ref> and Unknown Worlds (edited by John W. Campbell).<ref>"Without a doubt, the major event in weird fiction in 1939 was the premiere of Unknown (later retitled Unknown Worlds)".Robert E. Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin Harry Greenberg, Rivals of Weird Tales: 30 great fantasy & horror stories from the weird fiction pulps Bonanza Books, 1990, p. xvii. Template:ISBN</ref>

H. P. Lovecraft popularised the term "weird fiction" in his essays.<ref name="cm" /> In "Supernatural Horror in Literature", Lovecraft gives his definition of weird fiction:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

S. T. Joshi describes several subdivisions of the weird tale: supernatural horror (or fantastique), the ghost story, quasi science fiction, fantasy, and ambiguous horror fiction and argues that "the weird tale" is primarily the result of the philosophical and aesthetic predispositions of the authors associated with this type of fiction.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name= Joshi7-10>Joshi 1990, pp. 7–10</ref>

Although Lovecraft was one of the few early 20th-century writers to describe his work as "weird fiction",<ref name= Joshi1/> the term has enjoyed a contemporary revival in New Weird fiction. Many horror writers have also situated themselves within the weird tradition, including Clive Barker, who describes his fiction as fantastique,<ref name=Barker>Template:Cite book, pp. 217-18</ref> and Ramsey Campbell,<ref name=Joshi231/> whose early work was influenced by Lovecraft.<ref>Campbell, Ramsey. "Chasing the Unknown", introduction to Cold Print (1993), pp. 11–13. Template:ISBN</ref>

Notable authorsEdit

The following notable authors have been described as writers of weird fiction. They are listed alphabetically by last name, and organised by the time period when they began to publish weird fiction.

Before 1940Edit

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Taplinger Publishing Company, 1978, p. 90. Template:ISBN</ref>

May–June 1983, p. 84</ref>

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Normal, IL : Black Dog Books, 2010. Template:ISBN (p. 201).</ref>

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1940–1980Edit

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1980–presentEdit

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New WeirdEdit

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Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville have suggested that weird fiction has seen a recent resurgence, a phenomenon they term the New Weird. Tales which fit this category, as well as extensive discussion of the phenomenon, appear in the anthology The New Weird.<ref name="tnw" />

See alsoEdit

NotesEdit

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ReferencesEdit

External linksEdit

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