Abstract
The distinction between George MacDonald’s ‘realism’ and ‘fantasy’ seems so obvious and well-established as not to need any further comment. In 1924 the Times Literary Supplement in a Leader marking the centenary of his birth observed that:
The author of David Elginbrod and Robert Falconer and Alec Forbes was a good novelist. The poet of the Poems and the Diary of an Old Soul was a true poet. The author of The Golden Key and Lilith had a touch of genius … [but] not yet has he been recognised as the man who did one sort of work better than anyone else has ever done it … the writing of what are commonly called his fairy stories. (Child, 328–9)
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Works Consulted
W. H. Auden, ‘Introduction’ to The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald, ed. Freemantle (New York: Noonday, 1954).
G. K. Chesterton, ‘Introduction’ to Greville MacDonald, George MacDonald and his Wife (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924).
Harold Child, in Times Literary Supplement, 29 May 1924, pp. 328–9.
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford University Press, 1936).
C. S. Lewis (ed.), George MacDonald: An Anthology (London: Bles, 1946).
David Lodge, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’ in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeck (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).
David S. Robb, ‘The Fiction of George MacDonald’ in Seven, 6 (1985): 35–44.
David S. Robb. ‘George MacDonald and Animal Magnetism’, Seven, 8 (1987): 9–24.
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© 1991 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Prickett, S. (1991). George MacDonald and the Poetics of Realism. In: Filmer, K. (eds) The Victorian Fantasists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21277-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21277-4_7
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