George MacDonald powerfully influenced modern fantasy fiction, beginning with his contemporaries Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, and Howard Pyle and continuing into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with writers ranging from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to David Lindsay and Susanna Clarke. Much of that influence has to do with MacDonald’s ability to invest scenes with dreamlike intensity and mystery. In a MacDonald story, objects glimmer with half-sensed significance and undergo startling transformations. His narratives sometimes defy waking logic but always have the inevitability and urgency of dream. W. H. Auden identified MacDonald’s gift as ‘what one might call his dream realism, his exact and profound knowledge of dream causality, dream logic, dream change, dream morality’.

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.

While George MacDonald’s reputation as a fiction writer rests upon fantasy and Christianity more than realism, his realist novels reflect a remarkable generic range. MacDonald wrote twenty-nine realist novels between 1863 and 1897, most of them set in Scotland and England. Together, these novels share many overlapping themes and plot trajectories, and critics have objected to their formulaic characters (noble workmen, saintly women, dying children) and predictably happy endings. These shared features aside, the novels set in England also provide a micro-history of ‘the novel’ in the later Victorian age, incorporating elements of the social-problem novel and a concern for the urban poor; the sensation novel’s detective plot; and the gothic novel’s seeming supernaturalism, ultimately explained by nature. This chapter examines these subgenres as well as MacDonald’s sophisticated use of metafiction. While metafiction has been dominantly explored in modernism, MacDonald is one of many Victorian novelists whose self-conscious formal techniques draw attention to his experimental realism.

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.

Although George MacDonald considered poetry his primary literary vocation, his own verse works have received very little critical attention. His works are characterised by a restless experimentalism and a deep erudition. This chapter works to establish a basic understanding of the nature and organisation of MacDonald’s oeuvre. Under consideration are the poems included in his 1893 summative, self-edited anthology Poetical Works. These are approached as a textus receptus to evaluate the intentions and structure of MacDonald’s poetic project. The approach to this chapter, then, is in four parts: the first considers the closely held question of ‘Is MacDonald’s poetry any good?’, the second examines three impediments to the appreciation of MacDonald’s verse, the third offers a section-by-section overview of MacDonald’s Poetical Works (1893) – his self-edited anthology of his poems – and the fourth, a praxis segment, looks at an individual poem to see the various strands of his interests ‘in action’, as it were.

George MacDonald’s major novels for children can be read as demonstrating shifts in the development of English children’s literature from the perspectives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in relation to the approaches to moral education, the genre of fantasy, and awareness of social realities. Unlike his predecessors’ creations, MacDonald’s protagonists acquire agency; they engage with emotional and practical problems emanating from the immediacy of their social circumstances. The sophistication of the construction of his child characters and their interaction with their worlds, whether real or imagined, created the literary pathways for children’s writers to come, such as E. Nesbit (1858–1924), C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), and contemporary writers of fiction for children. The discussion focuses on signifying how his work relates to the history of English fiction for children through consideration of At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), Gutta-Percha Willie (1873), and The Princess and Curdie (1883).

This chapter studies the way in which MacDonald’s twelve Scottish novels relate to some of the dominant genres of Scottish literature in the nineteenth century, such as the national tale and the Kailyard school. It also analyses how MacDonald negotiates the tensions between nationalism and universalism in his works, since his ‘Scotch clannishness [was] a most elastic material & [he thought] of it as only a rudimental form of love to all men’ (letter to J. G. Holland, 27 May 1871). Finally, some attention is devoted to Adela Cathcart. While not usually included in MacDonald’s Scottish novels, Adela Cathcart can actually be read as a variation on the national tale and thus show how MacDonald’s works could exemplify Cairns Craig’s notion of a projective nationalism, whose aim was to make Scotland the spiritual core of the British Empire.

This chapter considers MacDonald’s work as a scholar and lecturer. From his 1859 appointment as professor of English literature and philosophy at Bedford College, to his (often sold-out) lecture tours in Britain, Europe, and North America, to the publication of his annotated Folio-based edition of Hamlet in 1885, MacDonald’s work as a scholar took various forms over the course of his literary career. What remained consistent, however, was his insistence that the critic should take a generous, affective approach, prioritising strengths over weakness and helping readers to experience the works at an emotional level. Drawing on both unpublished lectures and published scholarly works such as A Dish of Orts (1893) and the edition of Hamlet, this chapter explores MacDonald’s emphasis on the multivalence of texts, which anticipates post-critical approaches. However, the chapter also places him in dialogue with nineteenth-century critics Matthew Arnold and F. G. Fleay in order to draw out the distinctiveness of his critical approach within his context.

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 examines George MacDonald’s lifelong, multifaceted engagement with the fairy tale, arguing that he utilised the genre as a uniquely ‘liminal’ form capable of mediating spiritual truth. The chapter first establishes liminality – the ambiguous, transitional state in a rite of passage – as its primary analytical framework. It then explores the surprising, liminal places fairy tales occupied in MacDonald’s life: as medicine for the dying, as unorthodox lectures, and as a preparation for the message of Christ. Situating MacDonald’s work within the Victorian debate between didactic moralists like George Cruikshank and whimsical aesthetes like Lewis Carroll, the chapter argues MacDonald forged a third path, as articulated in his seminal essay ‘The Fantastic Imagination’. This theoretical foundation is then used to analyse MacDonald’s fairy tales (such as ‘The Golden Key’ and ‘The Light Princess’) as intentionally crafted liminal entities. His fairy tales are not vehicles for simple morals but literary rites of passage, designed to strip characters and readers of commonplace certainties and guide them across thresholds into deeper spiritual and psychological awareness.

Although MacDonald is chiefly known as a literary figure, he saw himself first and foremost as a preacher, preaching thousands of sermons across his career and publishing five volumes explicitly on spirituality. This chapter explores these sermons, both spoken and unspoken, seeing them as metaphysical landscapes providing a space and a medium for theological reflection and spiritual formation. MacDonald’s theological aesthetic is to be found not only in the synthetic biblical hermeneutic he employed but also in the sense of the transcendent which pervades his sermons; his modus operandi in the sermons is the divine sonship, with an emphasis on ‘our real life with Christ concealed’, a distinctive feature of Scottish spirituality. MacDonald was a spiritual explorer, always in search of the inexhaustible ‘treasures of darkness’.

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.

This chapter offers a description of the late phase of modernization of Hebrew literature, from the 1860s with the rise of the Hebrew press, to fin-de-siècle modernist poetics as expressed namely by the genre of the short story. It holds a double perspective, regarding the development of the infrastructure of both Hebrew print and editorial initiatives (the daily Hebrew press, the feuilliton, the Hebrew “penny books”) and the modernist poetics of representation (the figure of the alienated modern Jew in the early poetics of David Frishman, Reuben Brainin, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Ben-Avigdor and Hayim-Nahman Bialik). Finally, this chapter discusses the cultural positions of influence and imitation in nineteenth-century Hebrew translation (Kalman Shulman, translator of Eugène Sue; Meir Halevy Leteris, translator of Goethe; Eduard Zalkinsohn, translator of Shakespeare; Nahum Slouschz, translator of Emile Zola).

This chapter argues that any discussion of Aboriginal writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is political in nature and requires an interrogation of the role of Western epistemologies in the colonisation of Aboriginal lands, waters and cultures. It considers the role of English language and text in the conceptualisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and Australian literature’s role within Western epistemological supremacy. The chapter argues that Aboriginal storytelling modes, particularly poetry, have been central to resistance and struggle against British colonisation. It explores the strengths of Aboriginal writing and the role of Aboriginal poetry in decolonisation.

This chapter considers how nineteenth-century poetry in Australia adapted European conceptualisations of the sublime and the gothic to articulate a literal inability to settle on the land. It argues that settler poetry has a difficulty with being grounded: its representations have a tendency to hover, sublimely, above the surface of the earth; or, if forced under, they refuse to simply die: but live on, as gothic, revenant, voices. It draws on popular and canonical examples like A. B. (Banjo) Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” and “Waltzing Matilda,” Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “The Sick Stockrider,” and Mary Gilmore’s “Old Botany Bay,” as well as examples that have been sourced from historical archives.

Representations of race are intimately bound to representations of the struggle for freedom and autonomy, made more complex by focusing on novels written by women. These representations of race in Irish women’s literature challenge the ability of Irish women to achieve independence alongside rather than against the colonized peoples of the nineteenth-century Irish literary landscape. From Sydney Owenson to Kate O’Brien, from the Act of Union to Ireland’s independence and its joining the European Economic Community, the way in which Irish women’s fiction has defined freedom has depended upon a politics of race, a politics that is sometimes sympathetic and rooted in affective anti-imperialism, and other times is a politics of denial and erasure. If studies of Irish women’s literature is to contend fully with the history of race, we must be attuned to these politics even, or especially, if the narratives of self-fulfilment and independence become the objects of critique.

This chapter investigates the ways in which writers used the rapidly expanding wired networks of electrical communications technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone to reimagine notions of community, nation, and empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of electrical communication networks was motivated by, and in turn enabled, the spread of empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, establishing models of center and periphery in stark contrast with utopian predictions of global interconnection. Worth shows how telegraph and telephone wires were conceived not only as nerves connecting the globe, but also, acting as the circulatory system of Empire, as veins or arteries – “metaphorical carrier[s] not only of information but of blood.” In addition to establishing wired networks of earthly dominion, the telephone and telegraph opened imaginary connections into the uncanny and the otherworldly, seeming to transgress the boundary between life and death.