H. P. Lovecraft: Midnight Studies

This is not the H. P. Lovecraft we thought we knew. Lovecraft is a great writer and a famously difficult thinker, and Pedersen’s provocative and highly original argument is that he is fundamentally a figure in the European Romantic tradition, with close affiliations to Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and (especially) Keats. This is a fascinating book about which serious readers of Lovecraft will be arguing for years.

(Professor Darryl Jones, Trinity College, Dublin)

This book offers a fresh perspective on the twentieth-century American weird fiction author H. P. Lovecraft and argues that the gentleman of Providence was a Romantic at heart. The book takes a philosophical approach and draws on Lovecraft’s essays, fiction and letters as well as poetry. Along the way, the reader is introduced to Lovecraft’s relationship with wonder, his aversion towards the cold light of reason, his teetotalism and his love of gardens, contemplation, joy, the dramatic, the strange, the foreign and the beautiful. Also, the reader is privy to an exploration of Lovecraft’s wonder-evoking tropes, the idea of dark wonder and what he called the Dunsanian Conjuration.

Philosopher Jan B. W. Pedersen is the author of Balanced Wonder: Experiential Sources of Imagination, Virtue, and Human Flourishing (2019). He teaches at University College Diakonissestiftelsen, Frederiksberg, Denmark and at Folkeuniversitetet, Aalborg, Denmark.