Sean Elliot Martin Ph.d.

H.p. Lovecraft and the Modernist Grotesque Sean Elliot Martin Ph.d.

This study serves to bring Lovecraft into a new and more significant literary context, and to highlight the relationships between modernist and grotesque literature. Various authors are mentioned with reference to both modernist and grotesque literary tendencies, and Lovecraft's "modernist grotesque" characteristics are analyzed in their connection to the three concepts that are prominent in both modernism and the grotesque: alienation, subjectivity, and absurdity. Biographical information about Lovecraft is used minimally in this study, which focuses on textual analysis of many elements of Lovecraft's writing that seem to have been previously overlooked, including religious satire, scrutiny of scientific practices, and the modernist concept of "literary difficulty."