Colin N. Manlove

This book grew out of the author's wish to go beyond a formal definition of fantasy to discover a basic urge and interest common to the genre. He finds this urge to be the celebration of identity. Fantasy is ultimately concerned to heighten and praise being, whether that being is God's creation, the world, or the creations of the fantasy writer themselves. This interest can take the form of direct eulogy or of more unconscious fascination. It is seen in fantasy's conservatism and its frequently elegiac mode, and is demonstrated through its formal characteristics such as circular structure and the use of juxtaposition to heighten individuality. It is more overtly present in modern than in pre-1800 fantasy, partly because modern fantasy developed as a Romantic reaction against technology and everything that reduced direct contact between people and the environment. These aspects of fantasy are illustrated from detailed discussion of the tales of Grimm, Walter de la Mare's Told Again, W. M. Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, Charles Williams's prose fantasies, Ursula le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, E. Nesbit's magic books, George MacDonald's Phantastes and Lilith, T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, William Morris's late romances, Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, and Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Together these authors and works provide a cross-section of what is a fundamentally panegyric genre demonstrating its variety, its strengths, and its limitations.

The Impulse of Fantasy Literature

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

This is the first account of invented stories involving the Christian supernatural. In their development a central concern is found to be the fantasy-making human imagination itself, at first seen as a obstacle to Christian purpose, but more recently given freer rein.

From 1200 to the Present

Christian Fantasy

After a decade from 1965 which had seen the growth in Britain and America of an enormous interest in fantasy literature, and a rise in its academic repute from cold to lukewarm, a serious study of the subject seemed long overdue. In this first critical book in its time on modern English fantasy, Colin Manlove surveys a representative group of modern fantasies—in the Victorian period in the children's scientific and Christian fantasy The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley and the mystical fantasy of the Scottish writer George MacDonald; and from the twentieth century the interplanetary romances of C. S. Lewis, the post-war fantasy of rebellious youth in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, and the quest to avert apocalypse in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The aim with all these works is to show the peculiar literary experiences they offer and to assess their strengths and limitations in relation to wider English literature. In the introduction to his book, Manlove gives a definition of fantasy, marking off the genre from its near neighbors science fiction and “Gothic” or horror story, and distinguishing between fantasies that are serious works of imagination and those that are fanciful or escapist. Each chapter that follows is primarily a literary analysis set in a context of the writer's life, thought, and other works. As the book proceeds, there begins to emerge a picture of the originality and merit of the writers, but at the same time the sense of a division in the purpose of each writer, whereby their works fail to abide by their own laws. In the conclusion to this book Manlove draws the different types of division found into one and argues that the problem is one that is endemic to the writing of modern fantasy.

Five Studies

Modern Fantasy

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.

Colin N. Manlove

About

Books

Join the club