Translating Awe into Evil: A Cognitive Perspective on Arthur Machen’s Use of the Horror Genre
Anna Shane
Abstract
“Here, of course, was my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil,” Arthur Machen wrote about his 1890s Gothic novels and stories. In these works, Machen aimed to use horror to generate in readers an intense spiritually and mentally enriching experience of awe that he termed “ecstasy,” a project that he came to believe he did not succeed in. This article uses cognitive critical work on horror to argue that Machen’s use of the genre was not a ‘failure.’ Cognitive critics now theorise horror as not only having the very effects that Machen intended, but as working according to the mechanisms that he suggested. Cognitive critical analyses support Machen’s earlier, more hopeful notion that horror is a highly successful vehicle for his project of using literature to generate particularly intense emotions and crucial realisations about the human condition in his readers. This article further analyses how Machen’s understanding of horror (and of fiction generally) was part of his understanding of the human mind as productively incapable of assimilating certain kinds of knowledge. While the general tendency in accounts of the human mind is to focus on its abilities and capacities, Machen’s approach demands that we also consider its limitations and inabilities, and how they shape and, paradoxically, enable intense experiences of both art and life. This paper reads Machen’s 1890s fiction as an attempt to make readers aware, through the use of horror, of how the mind’s failure to process knowledge might be productive.
Keywords
Gothic; cognitive criticism; Horror Studies; awe; sublime; Arthur Machen
Date of Acceptance: 1 July 2026
Date of Publication: 3 July 2026
Double Blind Peer Reviewed
Recommended Citation:
Shane, Anna. 2026. “Translating Awe into Evil: A Cognitive Perspective on Arthur Machen’s Use of the Horror Genre.” Victorian Popular Fictions, 8.1 (Spring): 106-19. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/VMYR8909
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
