An old supervisor of mine once gave me the following advice: ‘Make sure to write about something you are passionate about’ and ‘Weird Fiction: A Catalyst for Wonder’ is truly that as it combines my passion for wonder with my love for Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

The whole thing began when professor Anders Schinkel of Vrije University asked me to contribute to the International conference Wonder, Education, and Human Flourishing that took place at Vrije University, Amsterdam in 2019. I wanted to present something original, something entertaining; something slightly out of the ordinary yet something that would feed into the overall theme of the conference.

At the time I was deep into the wonder stories of Lovecraft and I thought to myself that the conference would be an ideal place to bring Lovecraft in conjunction with wonder into the limelight. It would also give me a chance to consolidate my thinking about Lovecraft in relation to wonder and hopefully help expose Lovecraft studies as a reputable academic enterprise.

The result was a talk that showed how weird fiction, which is a subgenre of speculative fiction and in particular the work of HPL is a catalyst for wonder.

The talk involved taking the audience on a wonder-filled tour of Lovecraft’s work, paying special attention to the presence of ‘dark wonder’, followed by some concluding thoughts on the educational value of exposure to wonder and dark wonder.

Somewhat to my surprise the talk was well received and I was delighted to see how Lovecraft’s words invigorated many an academic in the audience and when professor Schinkel later asked me to rewrite the talk for the open access anthology Wonder, Education and Human Flourishing: Theoretical, Empirical, and Practical Perspectives I was both thrilled and proud.

Sections:

Preliminaries

Lovecraft and Weird Fiction

What is Wonder?

Lovecraft the Wonder-monger

Dark Wonder

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