In early 1923 J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger published the first issue of Weird Tales magazine, giving a name to what is perhaps the most elusive popular literary genre: partially horror, partially adventure, partially fantasy, partially science fiction, but in any case 100% strange. The genre is now most often associated with H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories, which first appeared in Weird Tales and which focus on immensely powerful alien beings who ruled the earth before mankind's rise. But once the name was in place it was also understood to embrace earlier work by Edgar Allan Poe and other nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers whose work depicted things outside the normal realm. More recently, it's become popular among contemporary writers--many of them women or people of color--who use its non-realistic side to wrestle with real-world subject matter in ways that realism doesn't allow.

In this class we'll survey the genre from Poe to (the notoriously racist) Lovecraft, and then take up some fiction from the 2020s--including the Native American novelist Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Good Indians and the Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez's Our Share of Night--that uses the genre's capacity for horror and irrealty to reflect on historical and contemporary issues.

Requirements include regular reading quizzes, a research project on a writer whose work appeared in Weird Tales, and a paper emerging from that project.

This course fulfills the English Department Diversity Intensive Requirement.