Unique Legacy of Weird Tales

Justin Everett is associate professor and Director of Writing Programs at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and the coauthor of Dynamic Argument (2012). Everett created the Pulp Studies area for the Popular Culture Association and serves as its co-chair. Jeffrey Shanks is an archaeologist with the National Park Service whose research interests include the use of anthropological and sociological themes in early 20th century pulp fiction. He has authored a number of popular and scholarly articles on Robert E. Howard, including recent essays in Conan Meets the Academy (2012), Pulp Fiction of the 20s and 30s (2013), and Undead in the West II (Scarecrow Press, 2013).

Everett and Shanks provide a challenging, provocative collection of essays on the legacy and importance of Weird Tales magazine, particularly from its inception in 1923 to the end of the 1930s, when other magazines (e.g., Unknown) stole some of its thunder by paying higher rates to authors for similar stories. The editors view the magazine as a discourse community—‘a unique and tightly knit community of editors, readers, illustrators, and writers,’ as they write in their introduction—and they place the magazine in relation (and opposition) to literary modernism at the height of its influence. H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard receive the lion’s share of attention (5 of the 14 essays treat their work at length), but other important writers are covered, including C. L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Bloch. The little-known author Harold Lawlor, whose work was never collected in book form, receives much-needed attention from Sidney Sondergard, who plucks this writer’s reputation from obscurity. The letters column the magazine published is also taken seriously, with its swirling controversy over what ‘weird fiction’ actually meant. No bibliography, but extensive notes make up for that. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

• Introduction: Weird Tales—Discourse Community and Genre Nexus (Justin Everett and Jeffrey Shanks)PART I: THE UNIQUE MAGAZINE: WEIRD TALES, MODERNISM, AND GENRE FORMATIONChapter 1: "Something that swayed as if in unison": The Artistic Authenticity of Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of Modernism - Jason Ray CarneyChapter 2: Weird Modernism: Literary Modernism in the First Decade of Weird Tales - Jonas PridaChapter 3: “Against the Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller”: The Lovecraft Circle and the “Weird Class” - Daniel NyikosChapter 4: Strange Collaborations: Shared Authorship and Weird Tales - Nicole EmmelhainzChapter 5: Gothic to Cosmic: Sword and Sorcery Fiction in Weird Tales - Morgan HolmesII. EICH-PI-EL AND TWO-GUN BOB: LOVECRAFT AND HOWARD IN WEIRD TALESChapter 6: A Nameless Horror: Madness and Metamorphosis in H.P. Lovecraft and Post-modernism - Clancy SmithChapter 7: Great Phallic Monoliths: Lovecraft and Sexuality - Bobby DerieChapter 8: Evolutionary Otherness: An