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In a cosmos without absolute values. ..there is only one anchor of fixity..., and that anchor is tradition, the potent emotional legacy bequeathed to us by the massed experience of our ancestors, individual or national, biological or cultural. Tradition means nothing cosmically, but it means everything locally and pragmatically because we have nothing else to shield us from a devastating sense of "lostness" in endless time and space.
- H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1965-76, 2:356-57
THE RELATIONSHIP OF folklore to literature is complex. While writers may incorporate oral, customary, or material traditions to provide color, texture, or structure in their literary works, folklore also imbues those texts with authenticity. Folklore implicitly claims a transcendent "realness" for an author's ideology, whether that ideology is nationalist (as in the case of Finland's Elias Lönnrot), separatist (as in the works of Zora Neale Hurston), pluralist (Barbara Kingsolver), feminist (Sandra Cisneros), anti-modernist (J. R. R. Tolkien), or socialist (William Morris). In these examples, folklore-bearing cultures are often situated in opposition to threatening and "inauthentic" others, such as an imperialist regime, mass culture, or immigrants who disregard an existing cultural order.
Horror literature sheds light on how folklore can be used to these ideological ends. Drawing on legends and beliefs, on the architecture of old houses and the iconic power of religious symbols, horror writers often evoke "tradition" and "the past" in order to explore a perceived loss of tradition in the present. Much horror literature is predicated upon feelings of insecurity brought about by cultural change, by the idea that our families and communities, our familiar beliefs and cultural forms, are increasingly under assault by forces beyond our control. Whether the proposed threat is secularism, modernism, or niulticulturalism, tradition is often central to horror narratives.1
The work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), the influential American horror and science fiction writer, is a case in point. Lovecraft's writings embodied much of the ideology that surrounded the interest in folklore and tradition in the United States during the 1920s and '30s. Motivated by an antimodernist rejection of industrial capitalism and everything that surrounded it-including commercialism, mass culture, and immigration-Lovecraft combined an antiquarian interest in folklore and historic material culture with the passions of a preservationist and worries about cultural loss...