The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales

This volume collects critical essays that provide a broader understanding of the magazine Weird Tales and its authors, artists, readers, and editorial practices, as well as the larger impact that the periodical had on popular culture and genre fiction. In particular, these essays explain why Weird Tales deserved its subtitle "The Unique Magazine" and why works by some of its authors have endured.

Introduction: Weird Tales-Discourse Community and Genre Nexus (Justin Everett and Jeffrey Shanks)PART I: THE UNIQUE MAGAZINE: WEIRD TALES, MODERNISM, AND GENRE FORMATIONChapter 1: "Something that swayed as if in unison": The Artistic Authenticity of Weird Tales in the Interwar Periodical Culture of Modernism - Jason Ray CarneyChapter 2: Weird Modernism: Literary Modernism in the First Decade of Weird Tales - Jonas PridaChapter 3: "Against the Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller": The Lovecraft Circle and the "Weird Class" - Daniel NyikosChapter 4: Strange Collaborations: Shared Authorship and Weird Tales - Nicole EmmelhainzChapter 5: Gothic to Cosmic: Sword and Sorcery Fiction in Weird Tales - Morgan HolmesII. EICH-PI-EL AND TWO-GUN BOB: LOVECRAFT AND HOWARD IN WEIRD TALESChapter 6: A Nameless Horror: Madness and Metamorphosis in H.P. Lovecraft and Post-modernism - Clancy SmithChapter 7: Great Phallic Monoliths: Lovecraft and Sexuality - Bobby DerieChapter 8: Evolutionary Otherness: Anthropological Anxiety in Robert E. Howard's "Worms of the Earth" - Jeffrey ShanksChapter 9: Eugenic Thought in the Works of Robert E. Howard - Justin EverettIII. MASTERS OF THE WEIRD: OTHER AUTHORS OF WEIRD TALESChapter 10: Pegasus Unbridled: Clark Ashton Smith and the Ghettoization of the Fantastic - Scott ConnorsChapter 11: "A Round Cipher": Word-Building and World-Building in the Weird Works of Clark Ashton Smith - Geoffrey ReiterChapter 12: C. L. Moore and M. Brundage: Competing Femininities in the October, 1934 Issue of Weird Tales - Jonathan HellandChapter 13: Psycho-ology 101: Incipient Madness in the Weird Tales of Robert Bloch - Paul ShovlinChapter 14: "To Hell and Gone": Harold Lawlor's Self-Effacing Pulp Metafiction - Sidney SondergardIndexAbout the Editors and Contributors