Papers by Vivian Ralickas
Horror Studies, 2022
Ralickas identifies the horror of technology in Lovecraft's fiction as the human subject's abject... more Ralickas identifies the horror of technology in Lovecraft's fiction as the human subject's abject fear of machinery, whose alienating nature symbolically underscores the ubiquity of the Second Industrial Revolution's mass-produced recording and electrical devices including the phonograph, the telegraph, the photographic camera and the typewriter.
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2007
New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature, 2018
In taking Lovecraft’s biography as a starting point to an analysis of his notion of ideal masculi... more In taking Lovecraft’s biography as a starting point to an analysis of his notion of ideal masculinity, Ralickas offers a seminal analysis of a critical aspect of the abjection of self that undercuts any form of idealism in his fiction: the clean and proper body of the gentleman writer. To be specific, the strength of Lovecraft’s affinity towards Dandyism as a specific mode of masculinity extends beyond his personal aspirations to include his critical and aesthetic perspectives, manifest in his fiction, correspondence, and literary essays, particularly Supernatural Horror in Literature, wherein he reveals his fascination with leading Dandy authors of the nineteenth century. Through an examination of literary Dandyism’s ideological biases and the specific form of irony inherent in the Dandiacal works known to Lovecraft, Ralickas builds on scholarship linking Lovecraft to the Decadents by uncovering their influence on his deportment, political views, and fiction.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2006
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree o f Doctor o f Philosophy C... more A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree o f Doctor o f Philosophy Centre for Comparative Literature University o f Toronto
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2008
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2007
Kantian notions of sublimity abound in his fiction: phenomena whose principal characteristics are... more Kantian notions of sublimity abound in his fiction: phenomena whose principal characteristics are their formlessness, infinite expanse, or superhuman might; a subject's encounter with the negative or, put another way, symbolic presentation of what would be described in the fiction of a humanist as its noumenal self; and the limits of language 1 to represent adequately both the awe-inspiring spectacle and the subject's experience of the violation of the limits of being. Lovecraft's pronouncements on "cosmic horror," the effect he aimed to convey in his stories, seem to encourage a sublime reading of his work. Cosmic horror-that fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance-compels the expansion of the experiencing subject's imagination. Two recent studies, moreover, elaborate on the relevance of the Burkean and Kantian sublimes, respectively, in Lovecraft's myth cycle. In "Lovecraft and the Burkean Sublime" (1991), Dale J. Nelson defends the idea that cosmic horror is coeval with religious feeling in Burke. In "Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime" (2002), Bradley A. Will argues that the force of cosmic horror is based upon Lovecraft's presentation of the unknowable rather than merely the unknown in his fiction.
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Papers by Vivian Ralickas