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Traces how writers and thinkers associated with “New Weird,” “weird realism,” ecocriticism, and the “Weird Wave” in film reposition weirdness within mainstream media. Opens a special issue by outlining the challenge of defining “Weird” and begins a historical survey through the development of Weird Tales and its generic tensions.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/the-weird-a-disorientation/516093/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/the-weird-a-disorientation/516093.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"MrHarris58","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-22","2026-10-06",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":44},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why does the introduction emphasize that the “weird” resists definition and categorization?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"The text frames the weird as a category that dissolves generic glue and escapes containment by the act of introduction, since some texts remain recalcitrant to being fixed as “Weird.”","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How does the article describe the change in the status of weird fiction in the twenty-first century?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"It says the situation has profoundly changed: writers linked to the “New Weird” are praised for genre-blending, “lost” classics are being reissued, and related philosophies and criticism have developed around weirdness.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What definition of the weird does H. P. Lovecraft provide?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Lovecraft is quoted defining the weird as “a literature of cosmic fear,” requiring an atmosphere of dread of outer, unknown forces and a serious hint of the most terrible conception of the human brain.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},516093,1791404838,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":44,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},687212988360,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_276721f389ce27ea32af1340a28f341c","The Weird: A Dis/Orientation  \nRoger Luckhurst  \nFor nearly a century ‘weird fiction’, if it exists at all, has been a fugitive category, a blur in the corner of other genres. Unhappy and interstitial, it was usually abjected as the lowest form of culture in the explosion of the mass magazine pulps that emerged, crested and vanished between 1890 and 1945. Virtually the only recognisable name to crawl from these swamps was H. P. Lovecraft, but his strange success has been almost entirely posthumous, and was initially confined to a cult following in the outré world of gross-out horror.  \nThis situation has profoundly changed in the twenty-first century. Writers associated with the ‘New Weird’, such as M. John Harrison and China Miéville, are lauded for their genre-blending. Old Weird writers – such as Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen – have been ascribed Penguin Classic status, whilst a vibrant small press culture reissues many ‘lost’ classics, a trend now picked up by more mainstream publishers like the NYRB Classics series.1 There is a whole school of philosophy, sometimes called ‘weird realism’, that displaces phenomenology of Husserl with Lovecraft, creating a (non-)philosophy of horror. Ecocriticism has been thoroughly weirded. There is even a ‘Weird Wave’ of contemporary film, primarily associated with the Greek film-makers Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, although symptomatically some doubt the existence of a single wave.2 This is to say nothing of the rising influence of the weird on mainstream TV and cinema, from the tentacular sublime of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012)  \nto the mutterings about cosmic horror and references to Robert Chambers’s obscure 1890s horror fiction The King in Yellow in the first TV series of True Detective (2014) or the retro-slime of Stranger Things (2016) .  \nReaders new to this subterranean world may need some orientation. This is the aim of this special issue of Textual Practice, with essays ranging across the genre from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. This first essay is intended as an act of survey, or, in the end, anti-survey, since what soon becomes clear for the act of introduction is the recalcitrance of texts that might be fixed as ‘Weird’. I want to acknowledge the difficulty and elusiveness of the weird, a genre that dissolves generic glue, a category that defies categorisation, and that by definition escapes the containment of the act of ‘introduction.’ The weird reveals the best iterations of itself in the way it disorients any simple route map through the territory. Let’s start by weaving a narrative that will need to be steadily unpicked.  \nThe Straight Story  \nNaming: it ought to be a simple starting point. In March 1923, proprietor Clark Henneberger joined the burgeoning American pulp magazine market in fantastic stories with Weird Tales, subtitled ‘A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual.’ It was in the generic pulp format pioneered by Frank Munsey in Argosy in 1896, with 128 pages of rough, untrimmed pulp paper with bright, lurid covers. The first edition included Anthony Rud’s exemplary tale,‘Ooze’, a story of a scientist’s backwoods experiment with protozoan matter that produces a giant amoeboid thing that promptly eats his family. The story was so unsure of its generic status  \nthat it contained a reflection on ‘the pseudo-scientific story’: ‘In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to a logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.’3  \nThe proffered definition was close to the formulations being tried out by Hugo Gernsback, who developed the term ‘scientifiction’ in his new journal Amazing Stories in 1926, simplified to ‘science fiction’ three years later. Both Gernsback’s Amazing and Henneberger’s Weird Tales appealed to the same literary forebears: Poe, Verne and Wells. Ge","cbCaid2eWbfySoJl","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaid2eWbfySoJl","pdf",634066,36,"English","# The Weird: A Dis/Orientation\n## Readers new to this subterranean world and the purpose of the special issue\n## The Straight Story\n### Naming and the rise of Weird Tales (March 1923)\n### Pseudo-scientific story vs. scientifiction/science fiction\n### Weird Tales, Gothic revival, and weird menace\n### Editors and major contributors\n### Lovecraft’s definition of the weird as cosmic fear","[{\"question\":\"Why does the introduction emphasize that the “weird” resists definition and categorization?\",\"answer\":\"The text frames the weird as a category that dissolves generic glue and escapes containment by the act of introduction, since some texts remain recalcitrant to being fixed as “Weird.”\"},{\"question\":\"How does the article describe the change in the status of weird fiction in the twenty-first century?\",\"answer\":\"It says the situation has profoundly changed: writers linked to the “New Weird” are praised for genre-blending, “lost” classics are being reissued, and related philosophies and criticism have developed around weirdness.\"},{\"question\":\"What definition of the weird does H. P. Lovecraft provide?\",\"answer\":\"Lovecraft is quoted defining the weird as “a literature of cosmic fear,” requiring an atmosphere of dread of outer, unknown forces and a serious hint of the most terrible conception of the human brain.\"}]","The Weird: A Dis/Orientation | PDF",1791325222,55]