Nature as the source of Mysterium Tremendum: An essay on the poetic works of Blackwood, Smith and Campbell
This paper is an attempt to analyze three horror classics - Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907), Clark Ashton Smith’s “Genius Loci” (1936) and Ramsey Campbell’s “The Voice of the Beach” (1977) - in which the landscape is envisioned as the abode of supernatural power. The common thr...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade
2023-01-01
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| Series: | Filozofija i Društvo |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0353-5738/2023/0353-57382303452P.pdf |
| Summary: | This paper is an attempt to analyze three horror classics - Algernon
Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907), Clark Ashton Smith’s “Genius Loci” (1936)
and Ramsey Campbell’s “The Voice of the Beach” (1977) - in which the
landscape is envisioned as the abode of supernatural power. The common
thread between these stories is the concept of natural scenery which merges
and blends the real and unreal, the mind, flesh and the phenomenal world. As
landscape is a major component of the plot, rather than mere background to
the stories, the authors use it to formulate certain metaphysical ideas
about existence and the nature of reality itself. My objective is to
historically and epistemologically contextualize these ideas, clarify them
and relate them to particular recent developments in philosophy and social
theory. My second aim is to examine the semantics of space particular to
each narrative, the association and partition of its structural elements,
and the latent level of meaning arising from the organization of the
stories’ mise-en-scène. |
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| ISSN: | 0353-5738 2334-8577 |