Progress on Lovecraft 4/25 - 4/29

This week, I continued my research of the personal life and writings of H. P. Lovecraft. I also derived from my guiding questions what I consider to be a reasonable thesis, and I even have the very rough workings of an outline.

A few of my notes from reading the introduction to a collection of his works by S. T. Joshi:
-"...cosmic horrors that bleakly underscored the insignificance of humanity and all its works in a blind, godless universe."
-Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island
-father died (of syphilis); mother was crazy; liked his grandfather
-interested in chemistry and astronomy
-started writing at 7 years old; encountered [the writings of] Poe at 8
-dropped out of high school because of psychological problems

My original guiding questions/guiding ideas:

-Philosophy of Lovecraft?
-Influence on (American) literature?
-Relation to Poe?
-Influence on the Horror genre?
   ^--how is this significant to American literature?
-Supernatural horror as opposed to other horror
-Lovecraft's importance to the horror genre/influence of horror genre on American literature

(For the record, I really liked the idea of coming up with guiding questions instead of trying to define a thesis when we barely know anything about our subject. It worked much better.)

Thesis:

Based on some reading I did on and by Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, I have reached the following point that I will attempt to defend:
H. P. Lovecraft has had more direct influence on the horror genre as it exists today that any other writer.

The biggest obstacle in defending my thesis will, of course, be arguing that Lovecraft has had even more influence on modern horror than Poe, but I believe I will be able to claim that because Lovecraft's horror is more based on cosmic and science fiction-type events and phenomena, it is more pertinent to the present than Poe's more archaic style.

Progress on Lovecraft 4/18 - 4/22

This week, I read a few of Lovecraft's short stories, taking meticulous notes as I read. I also have my guiding questions more or less established. Some excerpts from my notes of a few of the works I read:

---"The Beast in the Cave" (1905)
-written when Lovecraft was 14
-no actual experience in caves (just went off what he read)
-Mammoth Cave in Kentucky
-p1: "Yet indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanor..."
-darkness of the cave has transformative property
   -devolves man into simian creature
-ending implies that narrator could/would have turned into this creature
-the fact that the "Beast" is/was human means that it could happen to anyone
   -people can personally relate to this

---"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (1919)
-takes place in the Catskill Mountains near New York
-anticipates some features of "The Shadow out of Time"
-mountain folk = primitive, almost subhuman people
   -comparable to "white trash" of the South
   -no social or familial structure - no committed relationships
-vague, cosmic, undescribed "oppressor"

---"Memory" (1919)
-inspired by Poe's prose poems - "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion"
   -also Poe's "The Valley of Unrest" ("the valley of Nis")
-ruins of an unknown civilization
-post-human world
   -apes, toads, Genie, and Daemon present
   -Man has practically been forgotten