A Century of Weird Fiction 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, by Jonathan Newell

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror by Jonathan Newell Michael Saler (bio) 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 siècle 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 fundamentally interconnected, porous nature of existence. Whereas Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s definitions of the sublime excluded disgust and exalted the human subject, Newell argues that disgust is the “sublime’s shadow,” dissolving anthropocentrism while evoking nausea as well as awe at the numinous nature of reality (69). Newell’s focused study should appeal to those who believe that the promiscuous use of the term “gothic” to cover virtually anything related to terror and horror from [End Page 722] the eighteenth century to the present renders that term meaningless. While he starts by defining both the gothic and the weird as “two modes . . . within a larger literary tradition” (5), he subsequently asserts that by the late nineteenth century, weird fiction becomes “a distinct genre . . . not merely a flavour of the gothic” (55). He charts a determinate genealogy for the genre beginning with Poe, who not only popularized the term “weird” but was an acknowledged influence on numerous fin-de-siècle writers who dabbled or specialized in works of fantastic literature. Many shared a common intellectual concern with the metaphysics of the nonhuman, thereby distinguishing the weird from the gothic’s focus on human subjectivity, as well as a recurrent affective strategy based on “the subject-dissolving power of disgust” rather than the gothic’s “subject-affirming power of sublime fear” (5). This argument about the weird supplanting the gothic receives empirical support from James Machin’s Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939; while Machin conceives of the weird as a mode rather than a genre, he observes that, “after the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly (1814), it is difficult to find examples of [the gothic’s] use as a literary term until the early twentieth century” ([Palgrave Macmillan, 2018], 14). Newell’s own study suggests that the pervasive use of the term “gothic” for material produced after the early nineteenth century is anachronistic and may occlude the unique cultural trajectories of modern fantastic literature. This work should also appeal to those interested in the intersections between theory...