Abstract

I analyze H. P. Lovecraft’s technique of producing the experience of the endless north and how the sense of motion and balance may be affected through the rhetorical device of topothesia, or the description of an imaginary place, in the short novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943). Worlds and realities are created through accounts of locations that grow ever more erratic and incomprehensible as the main character Randolph Carter proceeds on his journey, giving rise to a feeling of the sublime. I suggest a practical distinction between methods of intermedial and multimodal analysis, and employ a three-tier model of mediality to highlight the interaction of specific medialities. The words of Lovecraft’s story engage the senses by mediating imagined sensory perceptions the reader is compelled to imagine and turn into ideas, with the intermedial experience of the endless north shaped by the ongoing process.