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The Fantasy Literature of England
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.
Modern 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 t...
Critical Thinking
Students need a book which can show them actual means of thinking their way into literary texts. Too often they are put off by the resistant surface of literature, or made apprehensive by its eminence, or are convinced that there is nothing more than the obvious to be said about it. This book aims to meet this need. It seeks to involve the student in the actual process of thinking about literature, showing how to start with one idea and move to further and often new insights. To this end it presents a series of demonstrations in which the reader is invited to participate, without having to accept the author’s own interpretations.
The Impulse of Fantasy Literature
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...
The Gap in Shakespeare
The first purpose of this book is to provide new readings of many of Shakespeare's major plays, unhampered by bardolatry and, so far as possible, by critical preconceptions. Among the interpretations is an argument that contradictions found in Othello emerge ultimately from Shakespeare's inability to portray a developing heterosexual relationship in any of his plays; that King Lear operates by a technique of psychological and spiritual discontinuity that forces the audience beyond rational or common-sense awareness to the deeper levels of the play; that in Macbeth the hero is portrayed as killing his king not so much for any positive motive as out of an inability to find a reason not to do s...
C. S. Lewis
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
Scotland's Forgotten Treasure
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.
From Alice to Harry Potter
'The longer I live, the more I am convinced of the importance of children's books.' When Robert Bloomfield wrote this in 1817 he could have had no idea of the range of children's books to come, nor of how in England fantasy would be their outstanding form. In this survey of 400 English children's fantasies from 1850 to 2000, taking in authors from the well-known Charles Kingsley, C. S. Lewis and J. K. Rowling to the less-known Annie Keary, Edith Elias and Pete Johnson, Colin Manlove shows just how good their books often are as literature. He combines new interpretations of individual works with explanations of how and why their character changes over time, reflecting their different cultural settings. This book is intended both as a critical companion for children's literature courses, and as a stimulus for the general reader and students at all levels.
