Bøger af Colin Manlove

Novelist, writer of fantastic literature, poet, lecturer, preacher, George MacDonaldwas 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'sfantastic work nevertheless inspired C.S. Lewis, and enjoyed a revival with thenew interest in fantasy literature in the 1970s. MacDonald's fiction belongs notonly 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.

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

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.