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A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell; pp. ix + 241. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020, $60.00 paper.
Over the past two decades, scholars have attempted to define the nature of weird literature, seeing it as either a mode of the gothic, a distinct genre, or a marketing gimmick. In A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, Jonathan Newell presents it as a specific genre that commenced in the mid-nineteenth century with Edgar Allan Poe, assumed momentum at the fin de siecle in works by Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson, among others, and culminated in the early-twentieth-century works of H. P. Lovecraft. Based on case studies of these five authors, Newell argues that "the [weird] genre's key distinction from the gothic" is its "pivot away from the contents of the human mind towards the non-human world in all its horror and wonder" (58). The weird is fundamentally metaphysical, challenging the division in Western philosophy between human subjectivity and ontological reality, the "world-in-itself" (5). Weird tales express the radical alterity of existence that transcends all anthropocentric conceptions. Their narratives convey aesthetically that which cannot be apprehended logically-notably by deploying the affect of disgust.
Newell's linkage of the weird's preoccupation with an ineffable ontology and its recourse to gross-out techniques nicely resolves the otherwise paradoxical feature of this form of fiction: its frequent combination of disgust and ecstasy, the abject and the empyrean. Writers of the weird use disgust not merely for sensational effects, but to intimate the intermingled, monistic nature of reality. Newell demonstrates that his five authors intuited what recent scholars of emotions have documented: disgust is often elicited when boundaries are violated. By dissolving rigid categories through representations of hybridity, decay, and alien incursions into quotidian reality, writers of the weird are able to evoke, at a visceral level, the...