Product Description

George MacDonald occupied a major position in the intellectual life of his Victorian contemporaries. This volume brings together all eleven of his shorter fairy stories as well as his essay "The Fantastic Imagination". The subjects are those of traditional fantasy: good and wicked fairies, children embarking on elaborate quests, and journeys into unsettling dreamworlds. Within this familiar imaginative landscape, his children's stories were profoundly experimental, questioning the association of childhood with purity and innocence, and the need to separate fairy tale wonder from adult scepticism and disbelief.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137589 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a minister who was rejected by his congregation, and struggled thereafter to support his family of eleven children by writing. In his own day he was celebrated as poet, preacher, and lecturer, and as the author of numerous novels. He is best known today for his vivid children's stories. U. C. Knoepflmacher has published widely on children's literature and the Victorian period.

Customer Reviews

The fairytales finally available in modern scholarly edition
This new edition of MacDonald's fairytales is the first I've come across which aims to offer an accessible yet scholarly detailed edition of MacDonald's fairytales. Given that McGillis' editions of the children's novels are now out of print, I was delighted to discover that someone still sees the value of publishing his work in an affordable and student-friendly format. Knoepflmacher's introduction is excellent, and serves to locate MacDonald's fairytales within his own corpus as well as indicating their place with the tradition interest in the fairytales in the nineteenth-century, stemming from the Grimm Brother's first publication in 1812 and gaining ground throughout the intellectual revival via MacDonald, Ruskin and a number of other Victorian notables in the mid-century. Knoepflmacher's notes are also most intelligent, and he has a keen awareness of MacDonald's slightly uneasily innovative strain; I am particularly fond of the story of Ruskin's reaction to the swimming scenes in `The Light Princess'! This is a long-awaited addition to the growing MacDonald library, and I hope that perhaps in the not too distant future some of MacDonald's other writing `for the childlike' might be returned to us in a similar form.

Great!
I discovered George McDonald with Phantastes, an allegory about a young man's journey through Faerie, which is still my favourite book . However, many of his fairy tales still touch my heart and he'll always be amongst the writers I like most. He was a great influence to writers such as C.S. Lewis. It was time a good recopilation of his fairy tales appeared. If you're fond of fairy tales, this is a book you will surely enjoy regardless of your age.