[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Well, I've been there for this ten minutes. It's up to the scaler. The Queen's College, Oxford, which in is right here in Oxford, completed. Mosquito passionate Pulseless modern British pension is forthcoming per hour of the order of the Golden Dawn will be published early next year. Thanks very much. Um, I apologise it, um, at first because that, um, it's quite a tonal shift.
The title league between and Oxford fantasy and CSS Louis. Uh, and weird fiction. Um, uh, I've been trying to think of some correspondences between the two, and I think this is origin on with, um, here's a weird, weird fiction author. Um, uh, date similar to CSS Louis and Louis. Louis definitely read backwards. Um, I think as a, as a, as a teenager. Um, and there's also, uh, an apocryphal story that Tolkien got the phrase cracks of doom from one of, um, backwards towns.
So there is a link, I promise. Um, right. Uh, so weird fiction with tales, uh, the weird new weird, however you've heard it described. Described. Um. With um as an adjective, uh, to, to to talk about the kind of horror and supernatural fiction, um, that people like Edgar Allan Poe were writing in the early 19th century. Uh, is obviously not a modern term. Um. Uh, authors like, uh, Sheridan, Lieutenant Bram Stoker, Walter Scott, they were described as weird by critics.
Well into the 1890s. Um. It wasn't until the American poet magazine Weird Tales, uh, started to be published in the 1920s. Um, that weird fiction began to take on a life of its own. Um, as part of the genres that we think of, uh, these days as horror, science fiction and fantasy. Uh, writers became proud to label themselves as weird fiction writers, and they delighted in corresponding, corresponding between each other as, uh, connoisseurs of the wind. Um, but it's a slippery term.
Weird. Uh, particularly applied to literature and film. Uh, and it needs a definition. Some critics, some call that a subgenre, others a mode. But how does it differ from or rather, how does it infect or alter the kind of traditional speculative literature that people think of when they imagine fantasy literature or horror literature?
Um. So the American New England writer H.P. Lovecraft had a lot to say about the weird time he spent quite a lot of time trying to define and exactly what he thought it was. Um, whether you like his writing or not. Uh, we have to reject his racism and his, um, prejudice and politics. Uh, but any discussion of the way it has to take into account, um, his his early definitions.
Um, he had this to say in, uh, his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, the tree where its tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones or sheeted form, clanking chains, according to room.
Um, a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer unknown forces must be present, and there must be a hint expressed with a seriousness and contentiousness becoming at subject of that most terrible conception of the human brain, a malign and particular suspension of defeat of those fixed laws of nature, which are our own safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the demons of unplanned space.
So you can kind of see where it has been associated a bit more with the horror genre than any other, um, speculative gentlemen. Um, but what exactly is he saying here? Um, we just go back. Something more than the secret murder. Bloody bones or sheeted form. Uh, Lovecraft is writing in the 1920s, and here he's looking back at the kind of romantic Victorian, uh, tradition of the Gothic. Um, and where a lot of these things were kind of commonplace.
Uh, and while he admired writers like, um, Radcliffe or, uh, Mary Shelley, people that were using these, these tropes early on. Um, he, he kind of rejects them as something that is, uh, part of the literary great greats. Um, but this is where it gets a bit more interesting. Um, an unexplainable dread of outer unknown forces must be present. So if Olaf the Weird is cosmic in scope, um, out of forces by what she means outside of our normal understanding of time and space.
Lovecraft was an atheist. He rejected the idea of the spirit completely. Um, he was a materialist. He was very interested from an early age at, um, in, uh, astrology, astronomy, uh, looking at the universe. He was very aware of how big the universe was and how small um, humankind was in comparison to it. Um, and it was this kind of sense of, um. Uh, kind of our inability to perceive that universe and our insignificance.
Um, that was the true kind of terror at the core of the weird tale for Lovecraft. Um, uh, there is something that is out there that science has not yet discovered. It enters our world, however fleetingly and so indescribable and incomprehensible that many Lovecraft protagonists go mad. Um. No. Not yet. Um, atmosphere. Um, which kind of links with what, uh, Simon was saying about, uh, CF Louis and the fans?
It's our atmosphere is also very key word to describe the with um plots is secondary to then to the sensation of emotion which the way it evokes.
Um so Lovecraft goes on, the one test of the really weird is simply this whether or not there be excited in the reader, a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown speakers and powers, a subtle attitude of awkward listening as if to the beating a black queen for the scratching of outside shapes and entity on the known universe is utmost for him. Terrifying. Um, there are, of course, other weird writers other than H.P. Lovecraft writing at this time.
Uh, one writer in particular, the Welsh writer Arthur Machen, um, had a completely different, um, approach to the weird. And he didn't conceive of it in, in terms of the way. And he I don't think he ever used that word, really, and that he, he was more spiritual. He was more of a mystic. He believed that, uh, the material world, um, beyond that lay a kind of spiritual truth.
And that through the way the experience, he could kind of uncover it, um, and have a kind of transformed transformational experience. And it could be horrifying, but it could also be very joyful. Um, so got two very different, um, conceptions there. Um, transgression also seems to be a key element to any form of the weird. Uh, the idea of a boundary being crossed. Uh, the science. Science fiction writer, the China bureau. Uh, he's, uh, 21st century writer.
He talks about the weird, um, of the Lovecraft periods in revolutionary times. Uh, he he says traditional monsters were now profoundly inadequate, suddenly nostalgic in the epoch of modern war. I was at this crisis of traditional fantastic, the burgeoning sense that there is no stable status quo.
It's a horror underlying the every day. And, uh, more, more, more recent attempts to define the wave, uh, focuses on its ontological implications, particularly as a way to disrupt systems around us that we take for granted. So the ways in this, in this, um, conception is uncanny. It's Freud's on him. Like it's eerie. Um, but it's deeper than that. It's more powerful. Something that challenges the very structures of reality. Um. So there are three I've identified.
I've identified three main stages of the weird in in literature. Um, there are people who like to split it into two, the early period and the late variants. But, um, I think there are there are grounds to, to argue that there are three very distinct periods that each develop, um, what the way it becomes. Um. So the, the, the very early stage is the kind of late 19th century, um, we've got writers like Algernon Blackwood's on the left.
Uh, um, he started off as quite a conventional ghost story writer. That he, he became very intensely interested in things like theosophy and the occult and spiritualism. Uh, and this, uh, began to, in fact or influence what he later wrote. His tales got longer, focussed a lot more on atmosphere. Um, uh, Lovecraft's favourite weird tale was called The Willow, inspired by Blackwood's, uh, and this was this, um, enormous, uh, tale, a very brooding, um, story about, um, some, uh, two men.
You go, uh, canoeing down the Danube in Europe. Um, uh, and during the night, the willows on the banks, they start to whisper and, um, and move eerily. And there's a kind of hint that they're opening another dimension. Um, and then and then you have Arthur Machen that I've already mentioned. Uh, he started writing in the 1890s, uh, with novels like The Great God Poem and The Three Imposters.
And then his writing got a bit more spiritual. Um, he started focusing on Celtic Christianity and the Holy Grail and that kind of thing. Um, C.S. Lewis owned a copy of, of his novel The Secret Glory. So that kid has a kind of another correspondence that going on. Um, and then to the right that you've got Emma Jones, which might be the most recognisable name, um, uh, in this trio. Uh, and again, ghost stories, um, he was kind of thought to have perfected the ghost story in the early 20th century.
Um, but his what makes these stories weird is a kind of, again, it's the transgression. It's the, um, it's the bringing out these, these old academics, um, or antiquarians digging, digging in, uh, digging in the ground and bringing out these secrets that shouldn't have, um, shouldn't have been uncovered. So bringing the past into the present, uh, and all the implications that follow, um, second era, the American pulp era. So this is when, uh, pulp magazines started to become very popular.
Um, uh, very, very cheap magazines, um, sensational subject matter, um, often very hurriedly written and, you know, doing it for the money. Um, so a lot of it is quite. Bad. Unless he's very good. Um, I'd say the vast majority is quite bad, but. But there are like two. There are gems. Um. Uh, I'm getting a sign that says timeout. Have I reached my wish? Yes, yes. Okay. Um. I'll just. I'll just do the third, um, the third period, which is the new way.
Um, and this is very kind of this is of behaviour. He's a British writer and John Harrison, British writer and, uh, Captain Kenyon, uh, who is, uh, an American writer. And they're very, um, they're almost like postmodern weird. But they take inspiration from a lot of different places. Uh, they write urban fantasy. Um, and there's a debate as to whether the wave has continued or whether it stopped in the early 2000. Uh, and I'm not sure. And we can talk about that in the questions, if you like.
Uh, there we go. Uh, uh, could you speak a little bit of, uh, influences from different time? In that we have the opportunity to make a lot of movies that I think are important. Mhm. Uh, we become quite common, um, in marketing. Yeah. Do you mean, um, influences that the original authors? Um, I suppose each made, like, um. What? How were the ideas that fiction has influenced what we think of as horror today and across media? That's why the across media, we can now consider that in the world.
Mhm. We can definitely think of weird cinema and that's, that's definitely a thing these days. Um, and it's um, think of directors like Yama del Toro, the Mexican director, his, his films, uh, Pan's Labyrinth. Uh, what we do in the shadows, something, uh, what we do in the dark. Um, he's very explicit in his influences. Um, some of those films even reference Arthur Machen by name. Um, or, uh, an author like William Hodgson, who's also writing from that time.
Um, and those films are definitely in the ways, in a weird category, you know, Pan's Labyrinth. You've got a, um, a young girl going into these underground other worlds ruled over by a phone. Um, see what kind of possible influence in that. Um, uh, and then and then you have, um, I think the best instance of a weird film for me is Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer. Uh, which is about an alien who comes to this world and takes the form of Scarlett Johansson, uh, on a motorbike.
Um, and it's, uh. Yeah. Intensely weird. Well, we have to close the session now, but please join me in thanking.