The Darker Islam within the American Gothic: Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H.P. Lovecraft
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Ian Almond
Abstract
This article has two purposes: in the first section, the socio-political place of Islam as topos in the stories of Lovecraft - the various Daemon-sultans, Oriental figures and Arab sages we encounter in his work - is examined, given the already ex-tant research available on Lovecraft’s own reactionary, racist views. The article exam-ines the possibility that Lovecraft’s dark Cthulhu gods, with their secret, subversive plan to invade our human reality, is actually a resurrection of a familiar Christian Urangst of the Terrible Turk at the gates of Vienna; this time, however, re-enacted against a background of New England, rather than Tours or Lepanto. In the second section, we consider a single tale of Lovecraft’s, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” from a Sufi perspective, seeing how the various references to the Guide Love-craft calls the Umr at-tawil can be placed and re-interpreted in the context of Islamic Mysticism.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
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- EDITORIAL
- “A Woman Could (Not) Do It” – Role-Play as a Strategy of ‘Feminine’ Self-Empowerment in L.M. Alcott’s “Behind a Mask,” “La Jeune,” and “A Marble Woman”
- The Darker Islam within the American Gothic: Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H.P. Lovecraft
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- Reconciling Humans with Nature through Aesthetic Experience: The Green Dimension in Australian Poetry
- ‘Putting Things up against Each Other’: Media History and Modernization in Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton
- ‘History is about to crack wide open’: Identity and Historiography in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- INHALT
- EDITORIAL
- “A Woman Could (Not) Do It” – Role-Play as a Strategy of ‘Feminine’ Self-Empowerment in L.M. Alcott’s “Behind a Mask,” “La Jeune,” and “A Marble Woman”
- The Darker Islam within the American Gothic: Sufi Motifs in the Stories of H.P. Lovecraft
- Irish Tradition or Postdramatic Innovation? Storytelling in Contemporary Irish Plays
- Reconciling Humans with Nature through Aesthetic Experience: The Green Dimension in Australian Poetry
- ‘Putting Things up against Each Other’: Media History and Modernization in Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton
- ‘History is about to crack wide open’: Identity and Historiography in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
