❑Weird Fiction

❑Cthulhu Mythology

❑Must be analyzed within the

social context in which he lived

❑Folklore and Fantasy mixed

together
“Lovecraft's writings embodied much of the
ideology that surrounded the interest in folklore
and tradition in the United States during the 1920s
and '30s. Motivated by an antimodernist rejection
of industrial capitalism and everything that
surrounded it including commercialism, mass
culture, and immigration, Lovecraft combined an
antiquarian interest in folklore and historic
material culture with the passions of a
preservationist and worries about cultural loss and
miscegenation.”
 The Dreamlands, a
mirror version of our
world, reachable only
through dreams.

The Cats of Ulthar

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The story had its written genesis in a
poem of January 1920 and in a dream.
The dream was recalled by Lovecraft in
a letter of 21st May 1920. The completed
story was first typeset and published in
the amateur publication The Tryout for
November 1920.

• […]this old man and woman took pleasure in
trapping and slaying every cat which came near to
their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after
dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of
slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers
did not discuss such things with the old man and his
wife; because of the habitual expression on the
withered faces of the two, and because their cottage
was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading
oaks at the back of a neglected yard. -> echoes of Poe’s
The BlackCat (will be repeated in BlackKitten)
• And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to
• One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South
entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers
they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through
the village twice every year. -> Dark skin and mysterious origins.
meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his
arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager
could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try
very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly
taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were
assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy
uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the
shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid
creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full
of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
“He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of
tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is
the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of
hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin,
and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient
than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath
forgotten.” (The Cats of Ulthar)

“The proud Egypt wherein Pharaoh was Pharaoh

and pyramids rose in beauty at the wish of him
who dreamed them bowed down to the cat, and
temples were builded to its goddess at Bubastis.”
(Cats and Dogs)
“In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the
perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively
considered; and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and
fascination of the unknown. The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat
to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It
is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic
spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of
the supple grimalkin.”