Arkham, Barchester, and James
That subject line sounds like a particularly inbred law firm, doesn't it? Or maybe exporters of the Odd and Intricate to a Discerning Clientele.
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I'm writing the third of my "Tour de Lovecraft: The Settings" pieces for Weird Tales magazine, this one on Arkham, and it got me wondering if the "fictional city in the real world" trope is really just another service the Victorians provided us. Poe, after all, uses the traditional "Monsieur L--" type constructions, or real locations, for his "real world" pieces; his horrors are mostly placeless -- as he put it, of the soul, not of Germany. Thackeray does the same thing, with isolated fictional manors but mostly real locations.
Then in 1855, you get Trollope's Barsetshire novels, and bang-zoom, we're off, with Ruritania and so forth.
Without bickering and arguing over whether Phaeacia is meant to be as real as Sicily or as real as Tattooine for Homer's audience, and similarly ignoring philosophical devices like Utopia or Lilliput, does anyone before Trollope create a significant fictional city depicted as part of the real world? Did he invent the device for all practical purposes? Admittedly, the whole thing can only happen in naturalistic fiction, which means it can't be much earlier than Defoe to begin with -- but still.
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And from Barchester to Barchester Cathedral, this is as good a place as any to highlight a couple of essays on M.R. James that I've recently noticed on the Web. The first, "The Weird Works of M.R. James," by Clark Ashton Smith, is interesting primarily to see someone of resolutely un-Jamesian aesthetic discuss James' style. In our debased modern era, we have Michael Chabon's introduction to the OUP collection, Casting the Runes and Other Stories, which is perhaps most interesting in that even a critic as self-identified as anti-Modernist as Chabon still can't bring himself to get outside a cramped, twentieth-century mindset when discussing James. (Sex. Really? That's your great insight?) It's also remarkable for its ill-informed discussion of Lovecraft, although the remarkable thing isn't ill-informed discussion, or especially ill-informed discussion of Lovecraft, but that either are coming from Michael Chabon, who one would have expected to be, well, well-informed on the topic.
And speaking of Lovecraft, here's HP. Lovecraft on M.R. James, from Supernatural Horror in Literature. Still, not much insight, but what there is is (as with Lovecraft's criticism generally) gold. Maybe I will take whoever's advice that was and do a series of Jamesian commentaries for this winter's long-form serial LJ posts. We could call it "Ghost Stories of a Curmudgeon."
***
I'm writing the third of my "Tour de Lovecraft: The Settings" pieces for Weird Tales magazine, this one on Arkham, and it got me wondering if the "fictional city in the real world" trope is really just another service the Victorians provided us. Poe, after all, uses the traditional "Monsieur L--" type constructions, or real locations, for his "real world" pieces; his horrors are mostly placeless -- as he put it, of the soul, not of Germany. Thackeray does the same thing, with isolated fictional manors but mostly real locations.
Then in 1855, you get Trollope's Barsetshire novels, and bang-zoom, we're off, with Ruritania and so forth.
Without bickering and arguing over whether Phaeacia is meant to be as real as Sicily or as real as Tattooine for Homer's audience, and similarly ignoring philosophical devices like Utopia or Lilliput, does anyone before Trollope create a significant fictional city depicted as part of the real world? Did he invent the device for all practical purposes? Admittedly, the whole thing can only happen in naturalistic fiction, which means it can't be much earlier than Defoe to begin with -- but still.
****
And from Barchester to Barchester Cathedral, this is as good a place as any to highlight a couple of essays on M.R. James that I've recently noticed on the Web. The first, "The Weird Works of M.R. James," by Clark Ashton Smith, is interesting primarily to see someone of resolutely un-Jamesian aesthetic discuss James' style. In our debased modern era, we have Michael Chabon's introduction to the OUP collection, Casting the Runes and Other Stories, which is perhaps most interesting in that even a critic as self-identified as anti-Modernist as Chabon still can't bring himself to get outside a cramped, twentieth-century mindset when discussing James. (Sex. Really? That's your great insight?) It's also remarkable for its ill-informed discussion of Lovecraft, although the remarkable thing isn't ill-informed discussion, or especially ill-informed discussion of Lovecraft, but that either are coming from Michael Chabon, who one would have expected to be, well, well-informed on the topic.
And speaking of Lovecraft, here's HP. Lovecraft on M.R. James, from Supernatural Horror in Literature. Still, not much insight, but what there is is (as with Lovecraft's criticism generally) gold. Maybe I will take whoever's advice that was and do a series of Jamesian commentaries for this winter's long-form serial LJ posts. We could call it "Ghost Stories of a Curmudgeon."