A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror

Weird fiction has been undergoing something of a renaissance lately, among both academics and general readers alike. The former can likely be attributed to its perceived compatibility with critical theory, its ability to render the abstractions of certain aesthetic or metaphysical concepts into more concrete forms. Notably, thinkers such as Graham Harman, Eugene Thacker, and the late Mark Fisher have seized upon the genre as vehicles for philosophical discourse alongside the thrills. Jonathan Newell's new monograph, A Century of Weird Fiction 1832-1937, navigates similar terrain but distinguishes itself by viewing the genre through the lens of affect theory—more specifically, through the Weird tale's relationship to disgust. Drawing upon various theorists of disgust, including Carolyn Korsmeyer and William Ian Miller, Newell argues that the primacy of disgust as an affect within the Weird is largely due to the feelings engendered by our encounters with confused boundaries between certain ontological states. A key concept for Newell is Korsmeyer's notion of the sublate, a sort of middle category between the awe associated with the sublime and the more negative affective response associated with disgust.

Newell's work naturally draws upon discussions of disgust's centrality to horror and its sister genres. Notably, he describes his work as building upon Noel Carroll's argument from The Philosophy of Horror (1990), "the disgust monsters arouse is linked to the disruption of the categorical schema by which human beings make sense of the world," but Newell uses this observation to different ends (11). While Carroll is more interested in exploring the paradox of horror as a genre whose central appeal lies in its reliance upon negative affects, Newell is interested in how such works can be used to explore metaphysical concepts too abstract to be engaged with in more realist texts. Similarly, Newell builds upon Kelly Hurley's valuable exploration of the "abhuman" (itself an expansion of William Hope Hodgson's coinage) from The Gothic Body (2004), but expands it beyond the notion of bodies that are categorically confused but self-contained to also explore confused boundaries between the human body and other types of matter, which frequently surface in Weird fiction. Newell's text also represents a sustained inquiry into the Weird as a genre performing a kind of philosophical work distinct from adjacent genres such as the Gothic and Horror more broadly—one that privileges less anthropocentric modes of ontology, such as the relatively contemporary speculative realist and New Materialist movements.

Structurally, Newell's text bears some similarities to S. T. Joshi's seminal tome, The Weird Tale; both feature a series of individual case studies of Weird fiction authors leading up to H.P. Lovecraft as an exemplar of the form. Notably, Newell's periodization of the Weird tale starts earlier, with Edgar Allan Poe configured here as an important ur-practitioner of the genre. In Chapter Two, titled "The Putrescent Principle," Newell situates Poe within the fascination with German Romanticism pervading the American literary market at the time when Poe was active. Beginning with Poe's lengthy prose poem Eureka, Newell explores Poe's fascination with the inevitable dissolution of the cosmos into entropy and links it to three of the author's fictional works, "Morella," Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," each featuring a female character suspended between life and death in some manner—a slippery ontological position which Newell links to German Idealist philosopher F. W. J. Schelling's concept of the Absolute. In this and subsequent linkages between authors and their philosophical fellows, Newell is fairly responsible; he does not claim any type of direct influence from Schelling to Poe, merely an ideological kinship in which the two mutually elucidate each other's ideas.

In Chapter Three, "Ecstasies of Slime," Newell tackles the works of late Victorian Weird author Arthur Machen, contextualizing them within both the author's passionately...