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The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection

Carney, Jason R
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1396650887

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English.
"The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection" is a study of the fiction and poetry published during the age of modernist reflection (1923-1938) in the once ubiquitous pulpwood magazine, a medium typified by such titles as Black Mask, Dime Detective, Astounding Stories, Science Wonder Stories, Adventure, and many others. It treats a specific pulp magazine, Weird Tales (1923-1951), which in its emphasis on formal experimentation and technical innovation echoes in surprising ways modernist little magazines such as The Dial, Poetry, and The Little Review. It analyzes the short stories, poetry, and memoirs that fictionalize modernists, modernist art objects, and experiences of modern art published in Weird Tales in relation to canonical accounts of modernism in the criticism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.L. Mencken, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson and other associated theorists and critics of the movement, particularly Viktor Shklovsky. It considers the rhetoric of fiction of key Weird Tales writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, and frames it as a deliberately grotesque suturing together of a modernist aesthetic with conventionalized realism. It argues that the ambitious writers constellating around Weird Tales were animated by a troubled yet productive relationship with the aesthetic project of modernism. By situating their fiction in the context of certain poetry, correspondence, and criticism published in and around Weird Tales, this dissertation demonstrates how the writers studied sought to fictionalize modernist art objects as enduring forms that reveal "the occult truth of the ordinary," the visible yet not self-evident idea that ordinary phenomena are ordinary only temporarily.
Kurt Koenigsberger (Committee Chair)
Mary Grimm (Committee Member)
Michael Clune (Committee Member)
Timothy Wutrich (Committee Member)
American Literature; Modern Literature

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Carney, J. R. (2014). The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1396650887

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Carney, Jason. The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection. 2014. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1396650887.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Carney, Jason. "The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1396650887

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1396650887
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This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.