Timoshkina Maria Igorevna – postgraduate student, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Philology, Petrozavodsk State University; ORCID: 0009-0002-5812-2249
The article considers the methods of the modernist poetics in the works of H.P. Lovecraft – an eminent fiction writer of the XX century, who had a paramount influence on the development of modern horror literature. The principle of fragmentation of the “Lovecraftian myth” is revealed on the example of the review of the writer’s heritage. Based on the analysis of the novels At the Mountains of Madness (1936) and The Shadow out of Time (1936) other modernist techniques are identified, such as: alienation, the “modernist grotesque” and the resulting effects of the “illusion of stability” (S.E. Martin), “disorientation” and “derealization” of the characters. The worldview common with European modernism (in particular, Expressionism) which is a premonition of the reign of chaos, a sense of disillusionment with reality and progress, and a feeling of “alienation” of the mankind, on Earth and in the Universe, is revealed. H.P. Lovecraft develops these modernist ideas through the prism of fantastic and horror literature – reflecting them in the concept of “cosmicism”, in his fantastic and horror plots, as well as in the depiction of “fantastically-alienated” New England and “typical American” characters who undergo the transcendent experience of encountering supernatural horror.
the fantastic; “Lovecraftian horror”; modernism; fragmentation; alienation; modernist grotesque