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Post by Michael Connolly on Dec 30, 2017 14:34:02 GMT
Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James edited by S.T. Joshi and one Rosemary Pardoe (Hippocampus Press, 2007) is still in print. The articles range from the very good and accessible to the overly academic and damn-near impenetrable. In any event, it's interesting that Joshi includes articles that disagree with his own earlier view that M.R. James had little to say. Table of contents Introduction by S. T. Joshi I. Some Notes on Biography Montague Rhodes James: 1862-1936 (1936), Stephen Gaselee Montague Rhodes James (1966), Shane Leslie The Strangeness Present: M. R. James’s Suffolk (1986), Norman Scarfe M. R. James and Livermere (1998), Michael Cox II. General Studies Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) [extract], H. P. Lovecraft The Art of Montague James (1934), Mary Butts The Ghost Stories of Montague Rhodes James (1947), L. J. Lloyd The Toad in the Study: M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft and Forbidden Knowledge (1995-97), Simon MacCulloch III. Some Special Topics On Not Letting Them Lie: Moral Significance in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1982), Michael A. Mason Dark Devotions: M. R. James and the Magical Tradition (1984), Ron Weighell M. R. James’s Women (1993), David G. Rowlands “The Rules of Folklore” in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1997), Jacqueline Simpson “A Warning to the Curious”: Victorian Science and the Awful Unconscious in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories (1998), Brian Cowlishaw “They’ve Got Him! In the Trees!”: M. R. James and Sylvan Dread (1999), Steve Duffy Homosexual Panic and the English Ghost Story: M. R. James and Others (2002), Mike Pincombe “If I’m Not Careful”: Innocents and Not-So-Innocents in the Stories of M. R. James (2007), John Alfred Taylor IV. Studies of Individual Tales The Nature of the Beast: The Demonology of Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” (2004), Helen Grant A Haunting Presence (1999), C. E. Ward “A Wonderful Book”: George MacDonald and “The Ash-Tree” (2003), Rosemary Pardoe Who Was Count Magnus? Notes towards an Identification (2001), Rosemary Pardoe A Haunting Vision: M. R. James and the Ashbridge Stained Glass (2000), Nicholas Connell A Maze of Secrets in a Story by M. R. James (1993), Martin Hughes Thin Ghosts: Notes toward a Jamesian Rhetoric (2007), Jim Rockhill Nightmares of Punch and Judy in Ruskin and M. R. James (1996), Roger Craik An Elucidation (?) of the Plot of M. R. James’s “Two Doctors” (1990), Lance Arney Landmarks and Shrieking Ghosts (1997), Jacqueline Simpson [with an Addendum by Rosemary Pardoe] Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Dec 30, 2017 15:11:43 GMT
In any event. it's interesting that Joshi includes articles that disagree with his own earlier view that M.R. James had little to say. Are you sure it is Joshi who includes them, and not one Rosemary Pardoe?
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Post by ropardoe on Jan 1, 2018 11:12:41 GMT
In any event. it's interesting that Joshi includes articles that disagree with his own earlier view that M.R. James had little to say. Are you sure it is Joshi who includes them, and not one Rosemary Pardoe? I don't think Joshi and I disagreed with the inclusion of anything, though I confess I wasn't entirely happy about the overly academic essays (I do take the point about that criticism). I wouldn't have accepted them for G&S!
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jan 2, 2018 14:42:19 GMT
Are you sure it is Joshi who includes them, and not one Rosemary Pardoe? I don't think Joshi and I disagreed with the inclusion of anything, though I confess I wasn't entirely happy about the overly academic essays (I do take the point about that criticism). I wouldn't have accepted them for G&S! It still is a good collection of essays. The best, like “The Rules of Folklore in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James" by Jacqueline Simpson, deal with demonstrable fact rather than theory. And here's the original of the cover, by one Carl Wilton:
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jan 3, 2018 13:48:15 GMT
I think that the best general essay that serves as a good introduction to MR. James remains IRONY AND HORROR: THE ART OF M. R. JAMES written by Samuel D. Russell For The Acolyte, Fall 1945 edition. It was reprinted by the Ghost Story Society in 1993 and in A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M.R. James (Ash-Tree Press, 2001). Though it is cited in Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, I assume that it wasn't included because of its length. This is the best image that I can find:
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Post by ropardoe on Jan 3, 2018 14:19:37 GMT
I think that the best general essay that serves as a good introduction to MR. James remains IRONY AND HORROR: THE ART OF M. R. JAMES written by Samuel D. Russell For The Acolyte, Fall 1945 edition. It was reprinted by the Ghost Story Society in 1993 and in A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M.R. James (Ash-Tree Press, 2001). Though it is cited in Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, I assume that it wasn't included because of its length. It is a good one. The reason we didn't include it in the book was because it had already been reprinted in A Pleasing Terror, and we were aiming to concentrate on harder to find articles (not that A Pleasing Terror is easy to find nowadays, of course, except as an ebook). It's a great shame that Sam Russell never completed his essay: what was published was just part one.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jan 3, 2018 14:36:35 GMT
I think that the best general essay that serves as a good introduction to MR. James remains IRONY AND HORROR: THE ART OF M. R. JAMES written by Samuel D. Russell For The Acolyte, Fall 1945 edition. It was reprinted by the Ghost Story Society in 1993 and in A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M.R. James (Ash-Tree Press, 2001). Though it is cited in Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, I assume that it wasn't included because of its length. It is a good one. The reason we didn't include it in the book was because it had already been reprinted in A Pleasing Terror, and we were aiming to concentrate on harder to find articles (not that A Pleasing Terror is easy to find nowadays, of course, except as an ebook). It's a great shame that Sam Russell never completed his essay: what was published was just part one. I thought that he did complete it. He wrote a revised version, only the first half of which was published in Haunted#2 and 3, which he edited. 2 appeared in 1964, 3 in 1968. 3 was the last issue.
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Post by ropardoe on Jan 3, 2018 17:02:43 GMT
It is a good one. The reason we didn't include it in the book was because it had already been reprinted in A Pleasing Terror, and we were aiming to concentrate on harder to find articles (not that A Pleasing Terror is easy to find nowadays, of course, except as an ebook). It's a great shame that Sam Russell never completed his essay: what was published was just part one. I thought that he did complete it. He wrote a revised version, only the first half of which was published in Haunted#2 and 3, which he edited. 2 appeared in 1964, 3 in 1968. 3 was the last issue. You're right, of course. A slight misremembering on my part - it was the revision that was not completed. It's still a shame though.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jan 4, 2018 11:46:41 GMT
I thought that he did complete it. He wrote a revised version, only the first half of which was published in Haunted#2 and 3, which he edited. 2 appeared in 1964, 3 in 1968. 3 was the last issue. You're right, of course. A slight misremembering on my part - it was the revision that was not completed. It's still a shame though. I had to double-check the details myself. I'm doing a lot of reading around M.R. James now and Russell's is the essay that, if I had not read M.R. James before, would make me want to read his stories.
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Post by andydecker on Apr 10, 2021 15:20:59 GMT
A question for the James experts. In the 30s, when Christine Campbell Thomson and Charles Birkin kept the genre alive with their anthologies, were writers like M. R. James and maybe Algernon Blackwood widely recognized as masters of the form? I guess Dickens, Collins or Wilde were household names, but is this also true for James?
I am writing something about the situation of the genre before the 70s boom, and if I read Hendrix and even King correctly, it seems to me that while the classics were kind of alive, there was not much new material on the market as there was no market. The same as in America, where Levin and Blatty kickstarted the genre.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 10, 2021 17:05:58 GMT
I'm certainly no expert on MRJ or anything else, but can confirm that James and Blackwood were indeed acknowledged masters of the form by the time the 'Creeps' and 'Not At Night's came along. Have been reading the Elliott O'Donnell biog where a contemporary newspaper critic dismisses his wonderful Scottish Ghost Stories (1911) as hopelessly inferior to anything James might be kind enough to favour us with. I'd say the Not At Night's were a direct reaction to Cynthia Asquith's The Ghost Book which took literary snobbery to another level. Away from the series, CCT had a huge admiration for the works on "Dr. Montague Rhodes James, E. F. Benson and Algernon Blackwood."
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Post by Dr Strange on Apr 10, 2021 21:23:46 GMT
I am even less of an expert, but it seems to me that there is something a bit wrong with the idea that the genre was being "kept alive" in the 1930s by these anthologies. This is a very sweeping generalization, but I think that something that maybe marks out the 1920s-30s as different to the period immediately before (at least in the UK and US) is that there were writers like James and Blackwood who were more or less focused exclusively on writing horror (or weird) short stories, rather than writing across many different genres and only occasionally turning to horror and the supernatural (like Benson, Buchan, Burrage, de la Mare, Onions, and many other popular and successful authors in that time period). As such, I suppose they may have been seen as "masters of the form" because they specialized in it, but there were plenty of others doing their own thing and in their own ways. And maybe what these anthologies were really doing was recognizing that there was a healthy market for these stories among readers who didn't want to have to search them out for themselves in collections (or magazines) where they were often buried among lots of non-genre stuff.
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Post by jamesdoig on Apr 11, 2021 1:27:00 GMT
A question for the James experts. In the 30s, when Christine Campbell Thomson and Charles Birkin kept the genre alive with their anthologies, were writers like M. R. James and maybe Algernon Blackwood widely recognized as masters of the form? I guess Dickens, Collins or Wilde were household names, but is this also true for James? I am writing something about the situation of the genre before the 70s boom, and if I read Hendrix and even King correctly, it seems to me that while the classics were kind of alive, there was not much new material on the market as there was no market. The same as in America, where Levin and Blatty kickstarted the genre.
I'd say a definite Yes for Blackwood and James being recognised as household names in the 30s and onwards, eg James' work always in print, appearing pretty much in all the big reprint supernatural/horror anthologies, and there were a lot of them! And they were always mentioned in articles on the ghost story in literature review periodicals of the time such as J ohn o'londons and so on. There might not have been much in the way of a dedicated horror market (but there was some, mostly short-lived), but a fair bit of horror was being published in the slicks (Matheson, Beaumont, Bloch etc), the general short story magazines like Argosy, the Short Story magazine etc, and in magazines regarded as crime like London Mystery Magazine, Suspense etc. And as I say, supernatural fiction anthologies, though invariably reprints, kept appearing.
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Post by andydecker on Apr 11, 2021 12:19:44 GMT
Thanks for the infos, all! I really appreciate it.
I would think that the different reception of the horror tale in the 30s in England vs America is in parts due that in England and on the continent there wasn't the this big magazine market i.e. the pulps. M. R. James, Benson & Co surely didn't write for a penny a word, the format of hardcover books lend the genre some credibility the pulps didn't have in America. Or selsewhere. I always was bemused by the fact that Thompson even knew about something like Weird Tales.
What James Doig wrote about the slicks would merit some research. I thought it very interesting that there was a small market for the genre short story in the slicks after the war, in publications one would never guess off hand. It seemed to have been for a lucky few with good connections and good agents. I never would have thought that crime writers like Ross Macdonald published in magazines like Cosmopolitan. Even if this only were some outtakes from upcoming novels from up market publishers like Knopf. It still is far removed from, say, Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine.
Or that the second or third tier men's magazine like Rogue published quite a few original horror stories. This would have made a nice theme-anthology. Michel Parry used a few of those stories. But I think it wouldn't have been too difficult to do a book with the best of Rogue, Cavalier and Playboy in the 70s.
But I digress. The point here is that it never was examined how many genre-stories appeared in all those magazines, which I guess were not bought by genre readers.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Apr 11, 2021 13:38:05 GMT
But I think it wouldn't have been too difficult to do a book with the best of Rogue, Cavalier and Playboy in the 70s. Have you run across the Playboy Book Of Horror & The Supernatural (1968)? As you'd expect, the list of contributors is impressive (albeit tilted toward male authors, which I suppose is also to be expected given the nature of the magazine).
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