Chambers was able to work as well in ethereal fantasy as in supernatural terror, and ‘The Demoiselle d’Ys’ is a hauntingly beautiful tale about a man who is supernaturally transplanted into the mediaeval age while hunting in the Breton countryside. Chambers, whose The King in Yellow has become something of a cult classic by virtue of the fact that elements from it were cited in the first season of the popular television show True Detective. One of the most unusual was the American novelist Robert W. The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might be considered a ‘golden age’ of horror and fantasy fiction, with many towering writers emerging, including the Scotsmen Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. ‘The Horror of the Heights’ makes use of the very recent invention of the airplane to depict the bizarre terrors that hapless aviators may encounter in the mysterious realm of our atmosphere. While he may be best known today for his Sherlock Holmes stories, which set the standard for detective fiction for all succeeding generations, he also worked extensively in horror fiction and even in science fiction. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle exhibited facility in several different genres. As such, he became the ultimate source for the entire genre of science fiction, and his focus on advances in technology makes him a revered ancestor to the related genre of steampunk. Jules Verne became famous throughout Europe for his novels of trips to the moon or voyages under the sea. His older contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, generally looked to an older tradition in his pensive tales of Puritans and moral temptation but in ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ he may have written the first known story of a robotic insect. His ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’ may perhaps be a satire or parody, but it was one of several tales that laid the groundwork for the genre of science fiction. ‘Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman’ is an interesting mix of scientific verisimilitude and political satire.Įdgar Allan Poe revolutionized weird fiction by restricting it to the short story and by relentlessly focusing on the psychology of fear. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may be the first true work of science fiction, but in several shorter tales she expanded on the ideas in that pioneering novel. In Great Britain, Sir Walter Scott drew heavily upon Scottish folklore in his several tales of ghosts and spectres, while in America Washington Irving created an imperishable modern fairy tale in ‘Rip Van Winkle’. Hoffmann’s enigmatic ‘The Sandman’ as a springboard for his discussion of weird fiction in his essay ‘The Uncanny’. The German writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine is an exquisite mingling of love and death, as it tells the delicate story of a water nymph who marries a human being. Long before the brothers Grimm codified many of these motifs in their various collections of fairy tales, beginning in 1812, writers found them full of inspiration. Many of the motifs used by the Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and by later writers, were drawn from ancient European folklore. Cosmic fear, he wrote, ‘has always existed, and always will exist and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them.’ Lovecraft wryly notes the tendency of mainstream writers to dabble in the weird and fantastic. In his masterful study, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, H.P. But all these genres had antecedents that extended back decades if not centuries and they also attracted the attention of some of the most acclaimed writers of their time. It is true that these genres (as well as others, such as the detective story, the western, and the romance) came into organised existence by way of the American pulp magazines of the 1920s. It is often thought that the genres of weird fiction, fantasy, and science fiction are recent products of popular culture. Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishmanīiographies & Sources Foreword: Swords & Steam The Winning of a Sword (from Part II of The Story of King Arthur and his Knights) The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall
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