Pulp horror and literary modernism interpenetrated rather than occupying separate cultural registers

Evidence

Lovecraft is the crucial figure here, since his texts — which first appeared in pulp magazines like Weird Tales — emerged from an occulted trade between pulp horror and modernism. Follow the line back from Lovecraft’s short stories and you pass through Dunsany and M.R. James before coming to Poe. But Poe also played a decisive role in the development of modernism — via his influence on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry and their admirer T.S. Eliot. “The Waste Land”’s debt to Dracula, for instance, is well-known. The fragmentary, citational structure of a story like Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu”, meanwhile, recalls “The Waste Land”. More than that: as Benjamin Noys argued in his paper “Lovecraft the Sinthome” (given at the recent “Gothic Remains” conference at Sussex), the abominations from which Lovecraft’s strait-laced scholars recoil bear comparisons with cubist and futurist art: Lovecraft, that is to say, turns modernism into an object of horror. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1103

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the arguments in Muslims in the Western Imagination about how marginal cultural forms produce lasting frameworks, and to craft interest in how genre boundaries blur. — connects to: Pulp modernism fuses high-modernist technique with popular-fiction riffs — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 205
• SEED: Angle: Lovecraft as horror’s revenge on modernism — modernism’s own techniques rendered monstrous when recast in the genre register.

Broader Connections

• Pulp modernism fuses high-modernist technique with popular-fiction riffs #corroborates (0.88) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 205