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Written by Azathoth
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Monday, 16 July 2007 |
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Page 6 of 7 There are a number of reasons that Lovecraft is not a widely studied figure in the academic community. The inconsistent quality of his work is perhaps the major point. A potential Lovecraft scholar could easily lose interest upon reading “Herbert West-Reanimator.” Even an interested scholar would have to put in quite a bit of effort to discover what Lovecraft actually wrote, because not all books purporting to be written by Lovecraft actually are, and there are stories written by Lovecraft that bear the name of other authors. Someone willing to go to that effort might well be turned off by Lovecraft's deplorable racism. Someone who can ignore that racism might still be turned away by the derivative nature of some of Lovecraft's stories, and decide to read the “originals” instead. None of these issues has anything to do with the oft-cited charge of institutionalized bias against certain genres.There is now quite a list of charges against Lovecraft. If there are all these problems with his writing, why would anyone bother to study him at all? Lovecraft's mature writing is powerful. It is original. It does not incorporate racist elements in the sense that his earlier work did. These writings were cut short by Lovecraft's untimely death. We can only wonder what gorgeous and hideous things he might have created had he been given more time.
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