/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22995055]

>H.P. Lovecraft Policy;
>H.P. Lovecraft was a well-documented and irrefutable racist. Even for the time his views were considered extreme. Lovecraft’s racism is inseparable from his work and informs the very foundation of his brand of horror. r/HorrorLit acknowledges Lovecraft’s place, influence, and legacy within the genre but does not lionize him instead we strongly rebuke and condemn his bigotry which has no place in our community now, then, or ever. This is our official stance and is not subject to debate

What is /lit/'s official stance on Lovecraft?

[Anonymous No.22995063]

I think being racist is the only intelligent option.

[Anonymous No.22995067]

>>22995055
He was a prophet

[Anonymous No.22995075]

You can like a book by a racist person and not be racist yourself. The two things aren't really connected.
It's like saying that because I enjoy Thomas Sowell's books that in some way makes me black. Or that reading The Diary of a Young Girl will turn me into a loli. It's playground logic.

[Anonymous No.22995342]

Finally, a thread that will appreciate this image.

[Anonymous No.22995352]

>>22995055
Imagine reading a 100 year old book and getting triggered because it doesn't conform to your modern day pearl clutching ideology. Hilarious, but sad.

[Anonymous No.22996515]

>>22995055
Dunno about the rest of /lit/ but Horror Lit's take is one of the most uneducated and smoothbrain takes imaginable. The schizo Anglo-cock sucker that was Lovecraft is actually weirdly fucking progressive for his time, his friends were all fags, minorities, weirdos, deviants, and so on, it's just that survivorship bias and the shitty state of modern academia which finally acknowledged he exists in the mainstream the last few decades means people don't fucking learn about it.

[Anonymous No.22996521]

>>22995055
He hated Germans and that makes him forever based.
Also, nice dubs.

[Anonymous No.22996546]

>>22995055
>people still don't realize that he rebuked most of his racism and antisemitism late in life
it's the same as the retards that look back at malcolm X and disregard the fact that late in life he rejected the NOI and black separatism and promoted Islam instead. That's the danger of writing shit down before you've achieved maturity, it crystalizes an immature belief for the ages. And if you get famous for this immature work you get trapped by a following into continuing with it instead of growing as a person/thinker/writer.

[Anonymous No.22996573]

>>22996515
The guy dated a jew so he can't have been that racist. He just thought black people were a type of ape, but that was a relatively common idea back then.

[Anonymous No.22996599]

The following:
>H.P. Lovecraft was a well-documented and irrefutable racist. Even for the 19th century his views are considered by us to have been ahead of his time. His racism is inseparable from his work and informs the very foundation of his visionary brand of horror. /lit/ acknowledge's Lovecraft's place, influence, and legacy within racism but does not lionize him as a horror writer, instead we strongly rebuke and condemn his purple prose which has no place in our community now, then, or ever. This is our official stance and is not subject to debate.

[Anonymous No.22997078]

>>22996573
For an apparently Anglo-Germanic supremacist [which science thought was legit at the time so if you were educated that was what you thought] a whole lot of his friends were celts [also considered basically apes] and swarthy one-degree removed from being named Juan Spaniards too.

[Anonymous No.22997135]

>>22995055
>Plebbit
Jesus christ filtered

[Anonymous No.22997201]

>>22995055
>Even for the time his views were considered extreme.
This is completely false.

[King Rael (formerly King Paimon) No.22998108]

>>22995055

FUCK YOU

[Anonymous No.22998679]

>>22997201
Yeah the survivorship bias around Lovecraft is absurd. It's like people don't understand that like...the number of people and even publications from the time with even half the amount of surviving documentation from that era in the US could probably be counted on one hand. If you weren't squirreled away in a dusty farm attic, in a reading list magazine, or had enough friends or die hard fans to hold onto your letters or copies of your works, you didn't survive.

Like the loss in the US there arguably cemented the literary gap between academia and wider culture and a huge number of "American literary Classics" are only such because they survived in any real numbers and were judged by academics to not be considered "Genre fiction" after two paper shortages, the great depression, and two world wars.

Lovecraft had reasonably large impact, and had like 30 friends who preserved fucking everything they read or sent eachother. There are presidents with less surviving correspondence and written work from that era. No shit he comes off as racist, it was the early 1900s, eugenics were in full swing so if you were educated and agreed with science you just were a racist, and he was a cowardly anglo man.

But even then his work is all about him going "Hey if science is right, then human instinct and love of virtue is worthless and a sign of degeneracy, but if our inner natures are true and being a dick is wrong, then everything we know and have had people die to discover and even killed to establish was a waste, we know nothing, and it has been pointless in the face of the universe." and him deciding that if he specifically EVER got an answer he'd probably go insane. And even then his best friend was a celt and he married a fucking Jew before WWII.