John Granger

Travis Prinzi

Colin Manlove

"Aberforth! Two more fire whiskeys for these friends! Welcome, HARRY POTTER readers, to the Hog s Head, the gathering place for members of Dumbledore s Army and the historic rallying point before the Battle of Hogwarts. We scholars of the Hogwarts Saga (Harry Potter s triumph over the Dark Lord) have come together here to share our researches on the meaning of Harry s seven adventures. Listen attentively to discover hidden secrets of the series and learn why the books are worthy to be studied more closely! Sip that fire whiskey slowly. Sit back and enjoy the ten best Hog s Head conversations of the past year, edited into this handy collection. And don t forget to throw your peanut shells to the goat in the corner. [includes essays by John Granger, Colin Manlove, Amy H. Sturgis, James W. Thomas and many others].

Essays on Harry Potter

Hog's Head Conversations

In this first book on English fantasy, Colin Manlove shows that for all its immense diversity, English fantasy can best be understood in terms of its strong national character rather than as an international genre. Showing its development from Beowulf to Blake, the author describes English fantasy's modern growth through the secondary world, metaphysical, emotive, comic, subversive and children's fantasy. Fantasy is often seen as being the same all over the world, but in fact it is strongly national in character, and as this book shows, nowhere more so than in England.

The Fantasy Literature of England

Fantasy Literature of England

The great Victorian Christian author George MacDonald is the wellspring of the modern fantasy genre. In this book Colin Manlove offers explorations of MacDonald's eight shorter fairy tales and his longer stories At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, and The Princess and Curdie. MacDonald saw the imagination as the source of fairy tales and of divine truth together. For he believed that God lives in the depths of the human mind and “sends up from thence wonderful gifts into the light of the understanding.” This makes MacDonald that very rare thing: a writer of mystical fiction whose work can give us experience of the divine. Throughout his children’s fantasy stories MacDonald is describing the human and divine imagination. In the shorter tales he shows how the imagination has different regions and depths, each able to shift into the other. With the longer stories we see the imagination in relation to other aspects of the self and to its position in the world. Here the imagination is portrayed as often embattled in relation to empiricism, egotism, and greed.

George MacDonald's Children's Fantasies and the Divine Imagination

In this, the first book on English fantasy, Colin Manlove shows that for all its immense diversity, English Fantasy can best be understood in terms of its strong national character, rather than as an international genre. Showing its development from Beowulf to Blake, the author describes English Fantasy's modern growth through secondary world, metaphysical, emotive, comic, subversive and children's fantasy. In them all England has led the world, with authors as different as Chaucer, Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien and Salman Rushdie.

Novelist, writer of fantastic literature, poet, lecturer, preacher, George MacDonald was a great Victorian ranked in his time alongside such writers as Dickens, Thackeray, William Morris, Charles Kingsley, and Thomas Carlyle. Though almost forgotten in the more secular age that followed his death, MacDonald's fantastic work nevertheless inspired C.S. Lewis, and enjoyed a revival with the new interest in fantasy literature in the 1970s. MacDonald's fiction belongs not only to modern fantasy, however, but to the whole tradition of supernatural literature from Greek myth to Dante, Spenser, Blake and German Romantic fairy tale-all, like him, now neglected. He is a great visionary writer who still speaks to us in profound ways.

The Visionary Romances of George MacDonald

Scotland's Forgotten Treasure

What makes the Harry Potter books so readable? Are they as Christian as is often said? Is Hogwarts real, or did Harry Potter dream his whole story? These are some of the questions explored by Colin Manlove in this dazzling new study, which looks at the Hogwarts books in terms of their readability, their literary value and their many meanings. Here you will find chapters on how much they owe to Christian fantasy and to alchemy; on what, compared to Enid Blyton's 'Fives' books, makes them page-turners; on the consequences of their interest in magic and imagination; on their love of change; and on the ordering of each book and the whole series through recurrent motifs and ideas. With these approaches, rather than simply selecting those few parts of the texts that support a theory, Colin Manlove is able to talk about everythingin the Harry Potter books, from the smallest common room conversation in Gryffindor to the greatest struggles with Voldemort.****"Colin Manlove's study of the Harry Potter books provides a welcome focus on their 'style and imagery and brilliant invention.' Manlove works closely with the seven books, illuminating aspects of the books thus far neglected in the criticism of the Harry Potter series. The Order of Harry Potter is the work of a writer intimate with fantasy, its conventions, its history, and its cultural variations."****Roderick McGillis, Professor of English at the University of Calgary, is a former president of the Children's Literature Association and the author of The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children's Literature****About the author: Colin Manlove taught English Literature at Edinburgh University for many years, where he received an honorary D. Litt in recognition of his pioneering research in literature. He is the author of over a dozen books including From Alice to Harry Potter (a survey of 400 English fantasy books) and C. S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement.Colin lives in Scotland within walking distance of where J.K. Rowling began writing the Harry Potter series.

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