SOURCE: Pennington, John. “Phantastes as Metafiction: George MacDonald's Self-Reflexive Myth.” Mythlore 14, no. 3 (spring 1988): 26-9.

In the following essay, Pennington asserts that George MacDonald's Phantastes “anticipates modern metafictional techniques.”

G. K. Chesterton called George MacDonald “a spiritual genius” whose “fairy tales and allegorical fantasies were epoch-making in the lives of multitudes, children and parents alike …” (p. 1) W. H. Auden considered him “pre-eminently a mythopoeic writer,” and “in his power … to project his innerlife into images, events, beings, landscapes which are valid for all, he is one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century” (v-vi). More recent critics are also kind to MacDonald: Stephen Prickett labels MacDonald “possibly the greatest fantasy-writer of that (or any other) period” (p. 10), Jonathan Cott describes him as “the greatest visionary writer of children's literature” (xli), and Jack Zipes places him alongside Dickens and Lewis Carroll as “the three most important writers and...