Supremely Monstrous Thought: H. P. Lovecraft and the Weirding of World Literature

This essay draws out the antipopulist and antinationalist implications of H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic antihumanism by tracing how his fiction (especially the tales At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow out of Time) deploys forms of representational inscription—maps, mural sculptures, and writing—to undermine the conceptual and historical basis of the nation-state and its founding subject, the people, and thereby to delegitimate the international political order and the disciplinary logic of world literature that reflects that order, both of which are predicated on the dialectical transcendence of nationalist traditions.