Lovecraft Short Stories by Laura Bulbeck

Notable in this regard is the emphasis that her essay places upon horror’s effects upon the physical body of the spectator: while the life-enhancing scenes of terror are said to ‘expand’ the ‘soul’, horror ‘contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates’ his or her faculties.

Though located very firmly in eighteenth-century debates, Ann Radcliffe’s account remains central to the ways in which we conceptualize the aesthetics of horror today.

Terror is an aesthetic of economy, while horror is the writing of excess. It is on the principle of obscurity, then, that the distinction between horror and terror for Radcliffe ultimately depends: ‘and where lies the great difference between horror and terror’, her speaker rhetorically enquires, ‘but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?’ If terror demands a lack of clarity, horror thrives on a sense of immediacy while terror proceeds by means of hints, suggestions and subtle prompts, horror is always graphic in its rendition, leaving almost nothing to the work of the imagination. While, according to the principles that Edmund Burke had outlined in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the terror that Radcliffe’s speaker finds in the work of Shakespeare and Milton is sublime, horror, the essay maintains, is lacking in the requisite sense of uncertainty that is central to the generation of sublime or awe-inspiring effects. Horror, by contrast, ‘contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them’. ‘Terror and horror are so far opposite’, her fictional stand-in in the essay, Mr W_, observes, ‘that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life’. In her posthumously published essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826), Ann Radcliffe, the most popular, successful and well-remunerated Gothic writer of the late eighteenth century, set out an extremely influential distinction between the aesthetics of terror and horror. The cover image is created by Flame Tree Studio, based on artwork by Slava Gerj and Gabor Ruszkai.Ī copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library.įLAME TREE PRESS | FICTION WITHOUT FRONTIERS No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.Īll rights reserved. Publisher & Creative Director: Nick WellsĮditorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian WhitakerįLAME TREE PUBLISHING 6 Melbray Mews, Fulham, London SW6 3NS, United KingdomĬopyright © 2016 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd

Lovecraft Short Stories by Laura Bulbeck