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.

The great Victorian Christian author George MacDonald is the well-spring 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.

This book is the first thorough analysis of the whole of Lewis' fiction to show it has behind it a considerable sophistication of literary technique and patterning. The works discussed include THE PILGRIMS REGRESS, THE RANSON TRILOGY, THE GREAT DIVORCE, the NARNIA books and TILL WE HAVE FACES. -.-.- "This is a positively brilliant book, written with splendor, elegance, profundity and evidencing an enormous amount of learning. This is probably not a book to give a first-time reader of Lewis. But for those who are more broadly read in the Lewis corpus this book is an absolute gold mine of information. The author gives us a magnificent overview of Lewis' many writings, tracing for us thoughts and ideas which recur throughout, and at the same time telling us how each book differs from the others. I think it is not extravagant to call C. S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement a tour de force." - Robert Merchant, St. Austin Review, Book Review Editor

"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].