Phantastes

Phantastes is one of the foundational works of modern fantasy, a strange, symbolic, and deeply imaginative Victorian romance that helped shape the literature of Faerie. First published in 1858, George MacDonald's dreamlike novel follows Anodos, a young man who enters Fairy Land and moves through forests, palaces, shadows, visions, temptations, and encounters with elusive beauty. Subtitled A Faerie Romance for Men and Women, the book stands at the meeting point of myth, spiritual quest, German Romanticism, fairy tale, and early fantasy fiction.

MacDonald's influence on later fantasy is difficult to overstate. His imaginative theology, symbolic landscapes, and treatment of Faerie as a realm of moral and inward transformation helped prepare the ground for writers such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, and many later authors of literary fantasy. Yet Phantastes remains very much its own book: wandering, visionary, unsettling, beautiful, and deliberately resistant to simple allegorical explanation.

For readers of classic fantasy, Victorian literature, Christian fantasy, symbolic fiction, and the origins of modern imaginative literature, Phantastes is an essential work: not merely an historical curiosity, but a living dream-book from one of the great nineteenth-century makers of enchanted worlds.