Categorising Lovecraft Defining the genre of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories

Abstract

H.P. Lovecraft is generally considered a writer of American Gothic Fiction. This paper argues that Lovecraft's later works, the stories of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, move away from the American Gothic genre and that Lovecraft this way situates himself into a different genre, namely that of Cosmic Horror. To find evidence for this statement, thorough secondary source research is done to establish a framework, after which primary sources taken from Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos are analysed and compared to works of American Gothic Fiction.