Algernon Blackwood

Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality - the laws and limits of time, space and matter. Here, unimaginable terrors lurk in hitherto unknown mirror dimensions, calamities in ultra-space threaten to wipe clean all evidence of our universe and experiments in non-Euclidean geometry lead to sickening consequences.

In twelve speculative tales of our universe's mathematics and physics gone awry, this new anthology presents an abundance of curiosities - and terrors - with stories from Jorge Luis Borges, Miriam Allen deFord, Frank Belknap Long and Algernon Blackwood

A review of Jonathan Newell's monograph A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror.  The book focuses on the Weird tale's use of disgust as an affective mode to explore questions of ontology.  Newell's charts a trajectory of such explorations over the course of a century, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and ending with H.P. Lovecraft.

Margrit Shildrick has argued that the monster's ability to disturb and unsettle arises from its position as simultaneously same and different, both self and other at the same time. Through an analysis of Algernon Blackwood's novella The Willows, this article discusses the challenge posed by by the nonhuman Absolute other, the nebulous creatures whose whose difference is total, as they appear in weird fiction. Drawing on posthuman theory, it explores the ethical implications of imagining the crumbling horizons of human subjectivity in the meeting with the absolute and unknowable other. This article argues that by bringing concepts such as the horror of scale, eco-phobia, the transformative power of awe, and the strangeness of matter into the monstrous figure , the weird undermines the structures that constructs human, culture, and mind as separate and different from the non-human, nature, and matter. By making us imagine a perspective from which humans are not just insignificant, but irrelevant, weird fiction not only challenges the anthropocentric worldview, but also makes us aware of the limitations and situatedness of human experience. Marianne Gunderson is a master student in Gender Studies at University of Oslo.

This essay examines Algernon Blackwood’s tree stories – “The Willows” and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” – and proves they dealt with the assumptions people make about nature. Blackwood’s love of nature led him to learn as much as he could about it, including evolutionary theory; his typical work aggrandized nature as a beneficent being, but these stories claim that people cannot really understand nature or the alien beings it evolves, as they are separated by their evolutionary history. Blackwood claims that the anthropocentric view of evolution and the world is erroneous, and uses dangerous entities that are not malevolent – trees – to do so. Morality in nature is, in these stories, a projection of humans, rather than any inherent quality. The trees have their own standards and methods, driven by evolutionary pressure to survive.

The classic weird tale constitutes an important interstitial genre between late nineteenth-century Gothic and twentieth-century science fiction. In their focus upon evolutionary degeneration, non-human life, and human insignificance in the face of a Godless, life-driven universe, authors such as Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, and Algernon Blackwood returned repeatedly to a concern with the nature and status of ‘the human.’ Non-human creatures and pre-human ancestors are used to question human pre-eminence.

Less frequently discussed is the ways in which these authors use plants and trees as a backdrop to, and a reinforcement of, their concerns. The titular willows of Algernon Blackwood’s most famous story “represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.” They are denizens of an “alien world”, one inaccessible to the human narrator and which may, in fact, bear an “aggressive hostility” to human intrusions. Mr Bittacy, the eponymous protagonist of “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” becomes absorbed by the forest around his home and loses a part of his humanity in the process, becoming a “half-emptied body.” For Blackwood, “The Vegetable Kingdom” comes to represent a wider view of nature unbeholden to God or humanity: it is “everywhere. Earth, air, and water [help] it, way of escape there [is] none.”

For Machen and Lovecraft, meanwhile, trees and plants seem to play a dual role. On the one hand, as for Blackwood, they represent a universe indifferent, even hostile, to human concerns. The “great and ancient wood” of Machen’s “Novel of the Black Seal” conceals atavistic, pre-human survivals, and acts as a kind of portal to the world before the advent of humanity: it is a place where one might be “stricken aghast by the presence of the slimy and loathsome terror of the ichthyosaurus […] or […] [see] the sun darkened by the pterodactyl.” The “unnaturally large and twisted” trees of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear,” meanwhile, mark a region from which animals flee in fear, and where isolated human families degenerate to the level of beasts. Lovecraft’s vegetation, both here and in the similar “The Dunwich Horror,” seems simultaneously to represent non-human life, and to foreshadow the atavistic trajectory of his human characters. Similarly, in Machen’s “The White People,” the woods provide the setting for a journey during which the unnamed narrator finds her surroundings in dialogue and sympathy with her own feelings.

For all these authors, however, the world of plants—hostile, reflective, or both—creeps in around the edges of the human and blurs the boundaries there. They employ vegetation to address the anxieties around human supremacy raised in the latter part of the nineteenth century by evolutionary theory, and to suggest that the borders of the ‘human’ must be guarded with an anxious vigilance.

幸田露伴『對髑髏』（1890年）は、ドイツ語や英語でも翻訳出版されているにもかかわらず、欧米でも日本でも露伴の他の作品に比べると研究はわずかである。まず、本作は、単純なプロットでありながら、古語による文体が用いられ、古典作品からの引用も多く、仏教思想や中国哲学の参照を要請する緻密な言語で構成されている。本作は浪漫主義・神秘主義の作品として分析されてきたが、作中のハンセン病（癩病）描写は、現代社会の寓意として理解することができる。その他の作品においても、文学作品でのハンセン病描写は、病気や帝国主義における不安と解釈することでより広範な意味を持つ言説と見なすことができる。続いて、ロッド・エドモンドの画期的な研究は、ハンセン病と帝国主義の関係を論じ、1890年代～1930年頃のイギリス文学におけるハンセン病表象には、植民地が帝国にもたらす脅威への不安が反映されることがあると実証してきた。エドモンドの研究をふまえ、本論は西洋と日本における幽霊譚を描く怪奇小説を比較し、それらの共通点および相違点、そしてその寓意に注目し、作品におけるハンセン病患者表象の重要性を論じる。西洋の作品としてコナン・ドイルやキップリングらの作品分析を行い、それらと『對髑髏』の比較を通じ、本論は露伴の『對髑髏』が現代の怪奇小説の原型であると捉え、露伴の革新性の考察を通じて、文学作品における病の役割や帝国観の一端を明らかにする。

Abstract
Koda Rohan’s Taidokuro (Encounter with a Skull) (1890) has not been the subject of much scholarly attention in Western-language scholarship, although it has been translated into German and English. One reason for this neglect is the apparent simplicity of the plot coupled with the incredibly dense language, filled with references to Japanese classical literature, Buddhism and Chinese philosophy. Although the text has been analyzed as a work of Romantic Mysticism, Rohan’s depiction of Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) in this tale can be understood as a modern social allegory. His depiction of Hansen’s Disease was in dialogue with broader discourses of disease and imperial anxiety. Rod Edmund has demonstrated the ways in which Hansen’s Disease was appropriated in literature to reflect anxieties of empires and threats to colonial centers in his groundbreaking study, Leprosy and Empire. Building on this, I discuss the significance of Hansen’s disease as a common trope in Western and Japanese ghostly tales. I first analyze the innovations of Rohan’s work in comparison to the way Hansen’s Disease appears in other Japanese ghostly tales before I reveal the similarities and differences between the depiction of ghostly visitors suffering from Hansen’s Disease in Rohan and the works of British authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, among others. Through this close examination of Encounter with a Skull, I draw attention to the play between archetype and innovation in this distinctly “modern” text and show how it operated within the context of global discourses of illness and empire.

... BY BRANDON JERNIGAN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: ...

The classic weird tale forms an important interstitial genre between late nineteenth-century Gothic and twentieth-century science fiction. In their focus upon evolutionary degeneration, non-human life, and human insignificance in the face of a Godless, life-driven universe, authors such as Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, and Algernon Blackwood returned repeatedly to a concern with the nature and status of ‘the human.’ Non-human creatures and pre-human ancestors are used to question human pre-eminence.

Less frequently discussed is the ways in which these authors use plants and trees as a backdrop to, and a reinforcement of, their concerns. The titular willows of Algernon Blackwood’s most famous story “represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.” They are denizens of an “alien world”, one inaccessible to the human narrator and which may, in fact, bear an “aggressive hostility” to human intrusions. Mr Bittacy, the eponymous protagonist of “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” becomes absorbed by the forest around his home and loses a part of his humanity in the process, becoming a “half-emptied body.” For Blackwood, “The Vegetable Kingdom” comes to represent a wider view of nature unbeholden to God or humanity: it is “everywhere. Earth, air, and water [help] it, way of escape there [is] none.”

For Machen and Lovecraft, meanwhile, trees and plants seem to play a dual role. On the one hand, as for Blackwood, they represent a universe indifferent, even hostile, to human concerns. The “great and ancient wood” of Machen’s “Novel of the Black Seal” conceals atavistic, pre-human survivals, and acts as a kind of portal to the world before the advent of humanity: it is a place where one might be “stricken aghast by the presence of the slimy and loathsome terror of the ichthyosaurus […] or […] [see] the sun darkened by the pterodactyl.” The “unnaturally large and twisted” trees of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear,” meanwhile, mark a region from which animals flee in fear, and where isolated human families degenerate to the level of beasts. Lovecraft’s vegetation, both here and in the similar “The Dunwich Horror,” seems simultaneously to represent non-human life, and to represent the atavistic trajectory of his human characters. Similarly, in Machen’s “The White People,” the woods provide the setting for a journey during which the unnamed narrator finds her surroundings in dialogue and sympathy with her own feelings.

For all these authors, however, the world of plants—hostile, reflective, or both—creeps in around the edges of the human. They employ vegetation to address the anxieties around human supremacy raised in the latter part of the nineteenth century by evolutionary theory, and to suggest that the borders of the ‘human’ must be guarded with an anxious vigilance.

A review of Jonathan Newell's monograph A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror. The book focuses on the Weird tale's use of disgust as an affective mode to explore questions of ontology. Newell's charts a trajectory of such explorations over the course of a century, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and ending with H.P. Lovecraft.

My dissertation establishes a critical dialogue between two distinct phenomena at the turn of the twentieth century: first, the exponential growth and mercurial nature of novelistic genres and, secondly, the emergence of modern global consciousness. Experimentations with genre, I argue, allowed writers to develop new narrative forms capable of representing an increasingly global, interdependent, and actively anti- imperialist world. Thus, this project specifically addresses late-nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century fiction that participates in or combines multiple genres, including Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and The Inheritors (with Ford Madox Ford), H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass, and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” This concentration of generic discontinuities not only demonstrates genre’s formal instability but also its inability to function as a symbolic solution to the real socio-economic contradictions of empire. While these texts reflect the stress-fractures of expanding imperial sovereignty, they can hardly be read as outright critiques of imperial rule. Instead, they operate dialectically. They are unstable yet flexible. Though discontinuous texts thwart generic expectations, they also offer systems of flexibility that express and potentially manage imperial crises.