This critical introduction presents a biographically structured overview of MacDonald’s writings, providing readers with a sense of his cultural and critical contexts. The editors delineate the three phases of MacDonald’s life and works (early, major, late) and identify the main stylistic and thematic emphases of each. The final section engages influential interpretations of MacDonald, by C. S. Lewis and others, arguing that what has sometimes been perceived as failures of MacDonald’s art is better understood as a kind of ‘generative awkwardness’ resulting from his aesthetic of ‘noble unrest’. The chapters that follow are gestured to as doors into MacDonald’s disruptive vision.

This chapter argues that ‘the people’ are dependent upon acts of invocation. Peoples are formed through invocation, whether projective or retrospective, as the people-to-come, or the people deposed and exiled from their just estate (and therefore still the people-to-come in reclaiming their inheritance). If there are always ‘people’, unaddressed, unarticled, going about their business of saying and doing, ‘The People’ always have to be invoked, not just being called on but being called up, or called into being, and summoned into a vocativity that can never be fully their own, since it means having to be given voice or brought to speech in order to speak up for itself. The chapter considers examples of this calling into voice in the work of Shelley, Chesterton, and Orwell.