SOURCE: Burleson, Donald. “On Lovecraft's Themes: Touching the Glass.” In An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, pp. 135–47. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991.

In the following essay, Burleson explores the broad thematic concern of Lovecraft's ouevre, which he deems to be “the nature of self-knowledge.”

Over the two decades of his career in fiction writing, H. P. Lovecraft progressed from relatively modest beginnings to final creations of high artistic power and employed a number of fictional themes repeatedly reworked at increasing levels of sophistication; yet in the broadest sense he remained faithful to the one thematic precept with which he began, clarifying and magnifying it as the corpus of his writing grew. He was a writer of the idée fixe. He started with a premise, and he finished with...