This chapter explores both the Scottish dimension of MacDonald’s biography and the ways Scotland is reflected in his writing. During his lifetime, Scotland itself underwent greater changes than the simple phrase ‘Victorian Scotland’ implies. In addition, MacDonald found himself in the position of feeling both intimately Scottish but also a distanced observer of the Scottish scene. His sense of his native land was compounded with his memories of his own early years there and with his reverence for Scotland’s previous literary achievements, particularly in the works of Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Scotland’s distinctiveness – indeed, its otherness – in the minds of his readers provided him with a means of articulating his own distinctive vision of reality, a vision which sought to relate the mundane world of Victorian Britain with the larger spiritual world of which (in his eyes) it was part. His fiction, therefore, encompassed both realism and fantasy; Scotland helped him bring the two into a fruitful relationship. By surveying the Scottish novels he wrote throughout his career, we can attain a more truthful understanding of his idiosyncratic contribution to nineteenth-century fiction.

George MacDonald’s best-known and most influential works are his two fantasy novels for adults: Phantastes and Lilith. They are also, arguably, his least typical works. It can be difficult for modern-day readers to comprehend these idiosyncratic texts through the distorting glass of the twentieth century, particularly the development of psychoanalysis and genre fantasy. This chapter, then, offers a door into these complex, fascinating texts by reading MacDonald’s fantasy novels on their own terms. It positions each novel within its biographical context, indicating how it relates to other works MacDonald was writing at the time, and re-examines the question of why he turned to this genre at the beginning and ending of his career. It then offers a comparative analysis of the two novels. What emerges is a glimpse into MacDonald’s profound effort to maintain hope and faith in face of his own mortality and devastating personal tragedy.

This chapter documents the almost entirely unexplored scientific biography of MacDonald, who found himself, in his Scottish education, at the forefront of Victorian innovation in science and science education. It resituates MacDonald’s writing within the contested debates and paradigm shifts in Victorian science, which attempted to redefine what science was and who got to participate in it – notions that changed drastically throughout MacDonald’s long life. It shows with which voices and views MacDonald aligned himself and into which discussions he actively sought to intervene, including on how Victorians envisioned its application especially in the ‘improvement’ of society. MacDonald’s fiction, and indeed fantastic literature in general, can be read as a foremost medium of engagement with and communication of scientific ideas. The final section of the chapter reads Lilith in this light – as MacDonald’s reflections on the place of science within society and the importance of it being unified with the imagination.

A key figure in establishing a “black musical idiom” and an American musical identity, pianist-composer Florence Price was groundbreaking in her efforts to create a compositional style that incorporated Black vernacular songs. This chapter focuses on her two fantasies in G minor (1933) and F♯ minor (1949) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952) in the context of Price’s cultural network and context, with specific attention given to her contemporary Clarence Cameron White (1880–1960) and to Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg (1888–1957), the dedicatee of Price’s second violin concerto.

This chapter examines the dialectic of positive and negative utopian tendencies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy. Critically acclaimed as a landmark series in the British New Weird subgenre, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) offer readers rich worldbuilding, blending neo-Victorian steampunk with semi-fascist capitalist oppression. Within the largely negative terrain of Perdido Street Station moments of utopian positivity can nonetheless flourish – most memorably in the inter-species love affair between the scientist protagonist and his insectoid partner. The Scar, which is set on a floating city-state, offers a positive utopian space partly modelled on the social organisation of real-world pirate ships on the eighteenth-century Atlantic. However, it also plays on Ursula Le Guin’s notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’, with counter-utopian as well as counter-counter-utopian narrative elements. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, sees a transition towards communism, focusing on the political construction of revolutionary utopian ideals. Together, Miéville’s novels present readers with a heady mix of fantastic worldbuilding and Marxist utopian politics, with overt references to the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and, more recently, the anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.

This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.

This chapter discusses world-building in the realm of fantasy and science fiction and its connection to conlanging. It explores the connections between language and culture and offers suggestions and a set of guided questions to build a fictional world associated with your conlang. This chapter also covers fictional maps and texts and introduces the fictional realm and a short text connected to the Salt language, a conlang that will be developed throughout the book. The chapter ends with a list of resources and references to explore further.

The chapter sets out to examine Nairobi as a site of cultural imagination. It argues that since its founding by the British colonialists, Nairobi has featured prominently as a site of “rest” for its many immigrant communities but also for the local Kenyans from its rural hinterlands. The chapter further examines how writers of African fiction have tapped into its rich tapestry, turning it into a powerful archive and a rich source of literary imagination. The chapter shows how Nairobi has become a site where the antinomies of the new nation-state play themselves out, as it gets mobilized by writers of fiction to figure a number of competing cultural and social imaginaries within Kenya and the East African region more broadly. By drawing attention to a set of fictional works on Nairobi, the chapter allows us to literally take a “walk” through the streets of Nairobi and to absorb its full significance as a layered site of archival imagination. It offers a glimpse of Nairobi as a bottomless resource for archive-building – a site of endless potential for literary imagination.

The book’s introduction explains the history of thought experiments in philosophy. It also describes Hans Christian Ørsted’s interactions with Kierkegaard and his influence on Kierkegaard’s concept of Tankeexperiment. The introduction outlines the ways in which thought experiments make thoughts meaningful by providing immediate presentations.

In two of Kierkegaard’s earliest works, The Concept of Irony and Either/Or, imaginary construction (i.e., thought experiment, or Experiment) is often characterized negatively. However, the three core features of thought experiment shared by Ørsted and Mach also begin to emerge, laying foundations for a more positive view in other works. Kierkegaard’s characterizations of thought experiment indicate that imaginary construction guides mental action. This focus contrasts with the standard emphasis in Kierkegaard scholarship on thought experiment as supplying the concreteness of (empirical) actuality. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard critiques irony as a retreat from reality but also shows it can be used to achieve new kinds of wholeheartedness and unity. In this chapter, I will argue that thought experiments can similarly lead the experimenter away from reality but, like irony, may also be a useful tool for self-development.

This section provides detailed and clear explanations of all Lacan’s major concepts. It arranges them as they appear chronologically in Lacan’s seminars. The book proposes understanding Lacan’s philosophy as it develops through three distinct periods – an early period in the 1950s, a middle period in the 1960s, and a later period in the 1970s. The advantage of this approach is that it allows us to understand why certain concepts appear at one time and then drop out in another or why certain concepts don’t appear until near the end of Lacan’s life. The argument of this section is that the objet a represents Lacan’s most far-reaching discovery, the discovery with the most philosophical importance. It occurs during the second period, which is the most radical period in his development.

This chapter focuses on “imaginary space” – literary spaces without a real-world referent. The question of how detached fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia came to be thinkable in the twentieth century frames the chapter, which argues for fantasy space as a strategic response to the alienations produced by twentieth-century capitalism. Weaving together a history of exploration with a history of different types of imaginary space, the chapter traces the emergence of works like Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia out of earlier forms of imaginary space. Types of space reviewed include the settings of the traveler’s tale (e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West), Thomas More’s Utopia, and the Romantic atopias of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. The chapter draws on the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, Fredric Jameson, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel Foucault to explain the distinctions between different formations of imaginary space. It concludes with a reading of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi as a text reflecting the changing value of fantasy space in the twenty-first century.

Contemporary speculative genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror have generated an uncountable number of non-realist plants that can provide new ways of re-enchanting – and returning us to – the real plants with which we inhabit the planet. Depictions of fantastical plants do not, however, always reflect an environmentalist agenda, and the long pedigree of monstrous plants demonstrates considerable complexity, for example in encoding monsterised images of both coloniser and colonised in the figure of the aberrant plant, or, in African-American literature, critiquing the plantation system’s violence against human and non-human bodies. In many serialised works, the plant can serve as merely a novel monster of the week among many interchangeable excuses for action and adventure, while other texts deploy the alien plant in order to imagine different modes of consciousness and being, or offer the promise that we might communicate more meaningfully with plants. The unusual plants to be found in much botanical speculative fiction may cultivate ecological and other-species consciousness in unconventional ways, as we see in texts from authors as different as J. R. R. Tolkien in his mid-twentieth-century epic fantasies and Richard Powers in his 2018 climate change novel The Overstory.

The paper will be looking at two Second World War texts, Olaf Stapledon’s 1944 science fiction fantasy Sirius, about the genetic modification of a sheepdog so that it becomes a superdog capable of speech and spiritual and erotic relationships; and Charles Williams’ 1945 theological fantasy All Hallow’s Eve. The novels are novels of ideas, testing theories of creative evolution and species distinctions with Stapledon, and damnation and control with Williams: both explore the death drive within the psyche in war culture, and posit the very different ways infection by Fascist politics have shaped those explorations.

A summation of the main arguments of the book.

William Morris has had many legacies: two of the most significant are in the fields of modern design and modern fantasy literature. In each, he had influential champions. The scholar Nikolaus Pevsner acclaimed Morris as a “pioneer of modern design” in 1936, and the fantasy author and critic Lin Carter lauded Morris as the progenitor of the “imaginary world” tradition of modern fantasy beginning in the 1960s. This chapter assesses their arguments through examinations of how modern design in interwar England came to be defined as an outgrowth of the Arts and Crafts movement, and how modern fantasy became associated in postwar North America with the creation of realistic yet autonomous “imaginary worlds” such as those found in Morris’s late prose romances. Morris’s fusion of medievalism and modernism assumed novel afterlives in each of these domains, as did his passion for world-building in actuality and in fiction.