The weird tale, in the period covered by this volume (generally 1880-1940), did not (and perhaps does not now) exist as a genre but as the consequence of a world view. Of the six writers covered here, only Lovecraft appears to have been conscious of working in a weird tradition; the others--even Blackwood and Dunsany, nearly the whole of whose fictional work is weird--regarded themselves (and were regarded by contemporary reviewers) as not intrinsically different from their fellow novelists and short-story writers.
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If the weird tale exists now as a genre, it may only be because critics and publishers have deemed it so by fiat.
I am not, as a result, prepared to define the weird tale, and venture to assert that any definition of it may be impossible. Recent work in this field has caused an irremidiable confusion of terms such as horror, terror, the supernatural, fantasy, the fantastic, ghost story, Gothic fiction, and others. It does not appear that any singe critic's useage even approximates that of any other, and no definition of the weird tale embraces all types of works that can plausibly be assumed to enter into the scope of the term. This difficulty is a direct result of the conception of the weird tale as some well-defined genre to which some works "belong" and others do not.