A ground-breaking new collection on Victorian scientists, theologian and fantasist George MacDonald has just been published, containing my essay ‘”A guiding radiance”: George MacDonald’s Science and Fantasy as a New Dialectic.’ MacDonald was famously a chief influence on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and encouraged Lewis Carroll to publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He was a fascinating and radical thinker, and I am thrilled that the book has already been receiving stellar reviews.
“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 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… 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
“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”
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
Dr Franziska Kohlt 