Overview

Although he was a man rooted in and engaged with nineteenth-century British culture, George MacDonald was no friend of Victorian convention. As this volume demonstrates, he was part of a tradition of counter-cultural writers, teachers, theologians, and reformers (including S. T. Coleridge, F. D. Maurice, A. J. Scott, and Charles Kingsley)-figures who stood up to injustice, fought for social change, opposed oppressive religious doctrines, and used imaginative fiction to transform individuals. These ten essays by leading MacDonald scholars such as Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, Trevor Hart, Elisabeth Jay, Kerry Dearborn-and including Stephen Prickett's final essay on MacDonald-explore how MacDonald participated in this counter-cultural tradition, critiquing commonplace biases and awakening individuals out of their moral and theological complacencies.

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What a book! The ten essays, plus Introduction, in this book are masterful: erudite, insightful, thorough, and even playful. They give us a view of MacDonald we have not previously experienced, showing the unity of his various writerly enterprises: poetry, essays, sermons, realistic fiction, and fantasy. They delve into literature, science, theology, and history to show that MacDonald's varied work is all of a piece. They also demonstrate just how radical MacDonald's work is, its challenge to easy certainties and conventional thought. The MacDonald these essays explore is an intricate thinker, and a writer acutely aware of the nuances and slipperiness of language. The scholarship here is most impressive picking up the last couple of decades of work on this most surprising and clever of writers. In short, this is the best book of essays we have on MacDonald, exceeding the several that have preceded it. This book is indispensable.Roderick McGillis, Emeritus Professor of English, The University of Calgary Editor of For the Childlike and George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs The essays gathered in this collection rightly reveal George MacDonald as a thoughtful and engaged social critic, alive to the cultural questions of his day. Its tri-disciplinary framework of culture, literature, and theology provides understanding of the intellectual ecologies that nurtured MacDonald, while offering real insight into his works. John Patrick Pazdziora, The University of Tokyo author of Haunted Childhoods in George MacDonald Unsaying the Commonplace has found the golden key for George MacDonald studies. Scholarship on the Scottish author is currently entering a golden age and this collection dazzles with its newfound brilliance. Timothy Larsen, Wheaton College editor of George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul: Annotated Edition

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