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Horrorliteratur – Ein Quellenverzeichnis nach H. P. Lovecraft

Hier nun ein aus Quellenangaben zu phantastischer Literatur bestehender Zusammenschnitt der lovecraft’schen Studie "SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE".

Ich habe mich auf jene Werke beschränkt, die Lovecraft mit Namen nennt – AutorInnen sind fett markiert, Titel hingegen kursiv. Wer mehr wissen will, muss Lovecrafts Werk schon kaufen.

(Apropos: Die […]-Markierung habe ich mir größtenteils erspart. Nennt es Faulheit oder Unwissenschaftlichkeit. Wie es euch gefällt.)

I. INTRODUCTION
»Dickens wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem Childe Roland; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford, The Upper Berth and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, The Yellow Wall Paper; whilst the humorist, W. W. Jacobs, produced that able melodramatic bit called The Monkey’s Paw.«

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II. THE DAWN OF THE HORROR TALE
»Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind«

»the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome passages in Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger to Sura, and the odd compilation On Wonderful Events by the Emperor Hadrian’s Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, Philinnion and Machates, later related by Proclus and in modem times forming the inspiration of Goethe‘s Bride of Corinth and Washington Irving‘s German Student.«

»The Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas«

»our own Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the later Continental Nibelung tales«

»Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and in Spenser‘s stately stanzas will be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and character. Prose literature gives us Malory‘s Morte d’Arthur«

»In Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster we may easily discern the strong hold of the dæmoniac on the public mind«

»Defoe‘s Apparition of Mrs. Veal«

»the translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne’s reign«

»Smollett‘s Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom«

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III. THE EARLY GOTHIC NOVEL

»THE shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque witch dances in Burns‘ Tam O’Shanter, the sinister dæmonism of Coleridge‘s Christobel and Ancient Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg‘s Kilmeny, and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of Keats‘s other poems«

»Burger‘s Wild Huntsman and the even more famous dæmon-bridegroom ballad of Lenore — both imitated in English by Scott«

»Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper Merimée in The Venus of Ille, and traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of The Ring«

»Goethe‘s deathless masterpiece Faust«

»Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto«

»Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called Sir Bertrand«

»The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777«

»The Recess, written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee«

»Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1792), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 but first published posthumously in 1826.«

»Edgar Hunily starts with a sleep-walker digging a grave, but is later impaired by touches of Godwinian didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister secret brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow fever, which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown‘s most famous book is Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)«

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IV. THE APEX OF GOTHIC ROMANCE

»the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1773-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvelous popularity«

»His drama, The Castle Spectre, was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fictions in ballad form — Tales of Terror (1799), The Tales of Wonder (1801), and a succession of translations from the German.«

»Miss Austen‘s famous satire Northanger Abbey«

»Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes one confused Radcliffian imitation called The Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio (1807), Maturin at length envolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth, the Wanderer (1820)«

»Balzac […] wrote a whimsical piece called Melmoth Reconciled«

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V. THE AFTERMATH OF GOTHIC FICTION

»MEANWHILE other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse‘s Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche‘s Children of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre‘s Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley‘s schoolboy effusions Zastro (1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya) there arose many memorable weird works both in English and German.«

»the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William Beckford«

»Galland‘s French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights«

»No less notable are the three Episodes of Vathek«

»the intendedly weird St. Leon (1799)«

»Francis Barrett‘s The Magus (1801)«

»George W.M. Reynold‘s Faust and the Demon and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf«

»Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. […] It was dramatized as The Iron Chest«

»Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-classics of all time«

»the fairly notable Last Man«

»Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, The Vampyre«

»The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering Willie’s Tale in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best compendia of European witch-lore.«

»[Washington Irving's] Tales of a Traveler (1824)«

»Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean (1827).«

»This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such short tales as The Werewolf, made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839)«

»Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits like The Signalman«

»The House and the Brain«

»The novel Zanoni (1842)«

»In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the creation of weird images and moods.«

»The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson — the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim,The Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.«

»Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë«

—

VI. SPECTRAL LITERATURE ON THE CONTINENT

»The celebrated short tales and novels of Ernst Theodor Wihelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a by-word for mellowness of background and maturity of form«

»the German classic Undine (1814), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouqué.«

»the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold«

»Novels like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Alraune, and short stories like The Spider«

»Victor Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass’s Skin, Seraphita, and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent«

»Short tales like Avatar, The Foot of the Mummy, Clarimonde [and] One of Cleopatra’s Nights«

»orgies of poetic phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony«

»[Prosper Merimée's] Venus of Ille«

»The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant […] The Horla is generally regarded as the masterpiece […] Other potently dark creations of de Maupassant are Who Knows?, The Spectre, He, The Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf, On the River, and the grisly verses entitled Horror.«

»Erckmann-Chatrian['s …] The Man-Wolf […,] The Invisible Eye […,] The Owl’s Ear and The Waters of Death«

»Villiers de l’Isle Adam['s] Torture by Hope«

»Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living writer Maurice Level, whose very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily to theatrical adaptation in the "thrillers" of the Grand Guignol.«

»the German novel The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink, and the drama The Dyhhuk, by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym "Ansky".«

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VII. EDGAR ALLAN POE

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VIII. THE WEIRD TRADITION IN AMERICA

»classic myths for children contained in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales«

»the macabre posthumous novel Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret«

»In The Marble Faun, whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader’s sight«

»Septimius Felton, a posthumous novel whose, idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished Dolliver Romance, touches on the Elixir of Life«

»Many of Hawthorne‘s shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident, to a remarkable degree.«

»It is [Fitz James O'Brien (1828-1862)] who gave us What Was It?, the first well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the prototype of de Maupassant‘s Horla; he also who created the inimitable Diamond Lens«

»Bierce‘s work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are obviously mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived from journalistic models; but the grim malevolence stalking through all of them is unmistakable, and several stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing.«

»In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent air of sinister menace«

»F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts.«

»the early work of Robert W. Chambers«

»Mary E. Wilkins, whose volume of short tales, The Wind in the Rosebush, contains a number of noteworthy achievements.«

»Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in The Yellow Wall Paper, rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined.«

»[Ralph Adam Cram's] The Dead Valley«

»Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and versatile humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent contains some finely weird specimens.«

»The Dark Chamber (1927) by the late Leonard Cline«

»Herbert S. Gorman‘s novel The Place Called Dagon«

»Sinister House, by Leland Hall«

»Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and short-story writer Edward Lucas White«

»Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as the California poet, artist and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith«

—

IX. THE WEIRD TRADITION IN THE BRITISH ISLES

»Recent British literature, besides including the three or four greatest fantaisistes of the present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often approached it«

»Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther from the realm of the real«

»[Oscar Wilde's] vivid Picture of Dorian Gray«

»Xelucha is a noxiously hideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shiel‘s undoubted masterpiece, The House of Sounds«

»In the novel The Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with tremendous power a curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind«

»Better known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs their net effect.«

»Dracula evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by "Sax Rohmer" (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Bliss.«

»the novel Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young«

»In the novel Witch Wood John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of the evil Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland.«

»The Green Wildebeest, a tale of African witchcraft, The Wind in the Portico, with its awakening of dead Britanno-Roman horrors, and Skule Skerry, with its touches of sub-arctic fright, being especially remarkable.«

»Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette The Werewolf, attains a high degree of gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore. In The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent effects despite a general naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake‘s The Shadowy Thing summons up strange and terrible vistas. George Macdonald‘s Lilith has a compelling bizarrerie all its own«

»Deserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen mystic world is, ever a dose and vital reality is the poet Walter de la Mare«

»Mr. Benson‘s volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power«

»H. R. Wakefield, in his collections, They Return at Evening and Others Who Return, manages now and then to achieve great heights of horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication.«

»Mention has been made of the weird work of H.G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle.«

[Hugh Walpole, John Metcalfe, E.M. Forster, Mrs. H.D. Everett, L. P. Hartley, May Sinclair, William Hope Hodgson]

»and we are therefore not surprised to find a share in such writers as the poet Browning, whose Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea«

Ghost and fairy lore have always been of great prominence in Ireland, and for over a hundred years have been recorded by a line of such faithful transcribers and translators as William Carleton, T. Crofton Croker, Lady Wilde […] Douglas Hyde, and W.B. Yeats.

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X. THE MODERN MASTERS
»the versatile Arthur Machen«

»the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood«

»Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision, is Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany [Lord Dunsany]«

»the scholarly Montague Rhodes James«

Oh Mann, ich wollte ja ursprünglich jede(n) AutorIn und jedes genannte Werk mit Wikipedia, Archive.org oder Project Gutenberg verlinken, aber ich lasse es bleiben, weil es mir davor graust, vielleicht schon bald hunderte Totlinks aussortieren zu müssen.