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Introduction

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Book cover Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939

Part of the book series: Palgrave Gothic ((PAGO))

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Abstract

In the introduction, Machin provides a survey of the history of weird fiction, and considers its relationship with associated genres, including cosmic horror, fantasy, and the ghost story. He also examines the development of the Weird as a critical term, its periodization into the Old and the New Weird, and its crossovers with contemporary cultural theory and philosophy. Grounding the period focus of the book in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he then provides a genealogy/etymology of the literary applications of the word ‘weird’ across that period.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For the attribution to Wells, see (Philmus 1977, 172).

  2. 2.

    Examples from myriad include Joshi 2003, 6; DiBiasio 2009, 88; A. VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2012, xv; Luckhurst 2015, 195; Thacker 2015c, 119.

  3. 3.

    In the original French text of Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970), he translates Lovecraft’s ‘weird’ as fantastique. Confusingly, the Cornell edition’s English translation renders Todorov’s use of fantastique here into ‘fantastic’, thereby losing Lovecraft’s original ‘weird’.

  4. 4.

    Austin, HRC, John Lane Company Records, Box 64, Reader’s reports 1894–1899, 2 July 1896.

  5. 5.

    It should be noted that non-technological non-explanations for travel in time and space can also be encountered in texts usually regarded as science fiction, for example Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912) and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937).

  6. 6.

    For detailed analysis of Hodgson’s fiction, see (Alder 2009).

  7. 7.

    The Oxford English Dictionary now provides the following etymological provenance for the noun ‘weird’: ‘Old English wyrd (feminine), = Old Saxon wurd (plural wurdi ), Old High German wurt, Old Norse urð-r, from the weak grade of the stem werþ-, warþ-, wurþ- to become’.

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  1. Royal College of Art, London, UK

    James Machin

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Machin, J. (2018). Introduction. In: Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90527-3_1

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