The Fantasy Literature of England (review)

The Fantasy Literature of England is the ninth book-length study of fantasy by Colin Manlove, taking its place among such standard references in the field as his Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975), The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (1983), and Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present (1992). The incrementalism of Manlove's method is clear from the frequency with which he points his reader to others of his books in which he has considered the same matters in different contexts or in greater detail. It is a method that results in an assured, if often summary, discussion of a wide range of heterogeneous texts in the present volume: texts of fairy tales, the work of Chaucer, John Bunyan, George MacDonald, Marie Corelli, E. Nesbit, the Inklings, A. A. Milne, Salman Rushdie, Terry Pratchett, and Angela Carter, among many others, all find a place in Manlove's survey.

Manlove begins with a brief introduction to his terms, to his choice of focus on a national literature, and to the organization of the book, and then moves to an account of the origins of English fantasy. In this account, he begins with "the classic English fairy-tales"—although he judges England to be "one of the most impoverished of nations so far as indigenous fairy-tales are concerned" (10)—and then considers the elements of fantasy to be found in the major texts of the English literary canon, from Beowulf, to The Canterbury Tales, to Utopia, to The Faerie Queene, to Dr. Faustus, to A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, to Paradise Lost, to The Pilgrim's Progress, to Gulliver's Travels, to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It is from the Romantics, with their "new interest in the imagination" (36), that Manlove dates the most important developments in English fantasy and, accordingly, his next six chapters outline the major tendencies of fantastic literature of the last two centuries.

These chapters are organized by "as natural groupings as possible," groupings that Manlove represents as "resolv[ing] themselves into six types in English fantasy" (4): secondary world, metaphysical, emotive, comic, subversive, and children's fantasy. Principal writers discussed as examples of secondary world fantasy writers include George MacDonald, H. G. Wells, William Morris, C. S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake, J. R. R. Tolkien, and T. H. White. The characteristics of metaphysical fantasy, which Manlove defines as fantasy in which readers "are often asked to take the supernatural presented as in some sense potentially real" (4), are described through discussions of books by G. K. Chesterton, T. F. Powys, Charles Williams, Muriel Spark, Arthur Machen, and Iris Murdoch. While the category of "emotive fantasy" includes both fantasies designed to elicit "fear or horror" and "enchantment and desire" (91), Manlove focuses on the fantasy of desire and returns to considerations of Morris, Lewis, and Tolkien, as well as taking up Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle books, A. A. Milne's Pooh books, Charles Kingsley, H. Rider Haggard, and Gothic novels. Manlove sees comic fantasy, which creates absurdity and invites readers to laugh at it, as a specialty of English fantasy. Important examples he mentions include works by Benajmin Disraeli, William Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, F. Anstey, John Collier, T. H. White, Mervyn Peake, Roald Dahl, Terry Pratchett, and Salman Rushdie. Manlove claims that subversive fantasy is "not continuously present in English literature"and is most obvious in post-1960 literature, where it can be seen as an "assault on old value systems" (143). Anna Kavan, John Fowles, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, D. M. Thomas, Christopher Priest, and Peter Ackroyd exemplify such assaults in various ways. As these lists of writers make clear, Manlove often discusses children's fantasy beside works directed to adult audiences, without much comment on the different readerships. In the chapter in which he focuses specifically on children's fantasy, Manlove represents the work of E...