H. P. Lovecraft - Posthumanist readings

This book is the first work in Hungarian to provide a comprehensive account of the life and work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), an American writer of weird fiction. The authors of this volume present Lovecraft's most important works from the perspective of post-humanist thought. They deal with Lovecraft's philosophy, worldview, mythology, gothic writing style and ecopoetics, among other topics. The building blocks of the modern worldview - such as science showing the inhumanity of the universe, dead matter, infinite space, Darwinian evolution - become in Lovecraft's work the building blocks of cosmic horror. Rather than urging the preservation of human values, the author confronts his readers with the horror of a world emptied of its material worldview. His world is a world beyond humanism: the all-absorbing blackness of horror. The authors analyse in detail the radical 'outside' of Lovecraftian horror, where alien forces take the vacant place of man. Their interpretations reveal new aesthetic, ideological and intellectual aspects of the oeuvre, while seeking to answer the question of why Lovecraft's work has had such an elemental impact on so many different aspects of contemporary culture.

At the launch, older and new publications from Kijárat Publishers will be available at a discounted price.