Greetings Everyone!
I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my recent
book: Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird
Tales. You can order it online from Bloomsbury, my publishers, or from Amazon and other online
booksellers around the world. The book
is also available in bookstores here in the states as well as overseas.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107690/
Lovecraft lost his privileged lifestyle in his teen years, when he and his mother were forced to move out of their Providence Rhode Island mansion and live instead in rented rooms located just blocks from their birthright. This was the most traumatic event in Lovecraft’s life and it activated his white fragility, which had been latent up until this time. Lovecraft’s racism intensified as well, for he could see that he wasn’t as privileged or superior to the so-called inferior, non-white races as he had believed.
Lovecraft’s loss of his privileged lifestyle, also,
triggered a pattern of loss and failure that characterized Lovecraft’s life
from that moment onwards: whenever he found himself facing a “crisis,” he would
freeze up and be unable to act—thus, whatever he was trying to accomplish ended
up in failure. This pattern is evident
not only in the various personal crises that Lovecraft found himself having to
face in his adult life, but we see this same pattern of behavior reflected in
the lives and careers of the fictional protagonists in his major works.
You can read all about Lovecraft’s personal traumas
and the psychological and psychosomatic
problems that plagued him in Horror
as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft!
JLS
