Lovecraft, H. P. - Donald Burleson (essay date 1991)
Donald Burleson (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: Burleson, Donald. “On Lovecraft's Themes: Touching the Glass.” In An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, pp. 135–47. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991.
[In the following essay, Burleson explores the broad thematic concern of Lovecraft's ouevre, which he deems to be “the nature of self-knowledge.”]
Over the two decades of his career in fiction writing, H. P. Lovecraft progressed from relatively modest beginnings to final creations of high artistic power and employed a number of fictional themes repeatedly reworked at increasing levels of sophistication; yet in the broadest sense he remained faithful to the one thematic precept with which he began, clarifying and magnifying it as the corpus of his writing grew. He was a writer of the idée fixe. He started with a premise, and he...
[The entire page is 6288 words long]
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