David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus must be read as an allegorical dream fantasy for its merit to be correctly discerned. Lindsay's central themes are introduced in a study of the man and his work. (Ch. 1). These themes are found to be common in allegorical dream fantasy, the phenomenological background of which is established (Ch. 2). A distinction can then be drawn between fantasy and romance, so as to define allegorical dream fantasy as a literary mode (Ch. 3). After the biographical, theoretical and literary backgrounds of A Voyage have been established in the first three chapters, the second three chapters explicate the structure of the book as an allegorical dream fantasy. Finally, the dichotomies which have been found in Lindsay (between Lloyd's underwriter and visionary dreamer), between the dream and the real world, between fantasy and romance, are found to be unified by Norman N. Holland's theory of literature as transformation / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study undertakes an examination of the representation of nature in works of literature that it regards as early British ‘mythopoeic fantasy’. By this term the thesis understands that fantasy fiction which is fundamentally concerned with myth or myth-making. It is the contention of the study that the connection of these works with myth or the idea of myth is integral to their presentation of nature. Specifically, this study identifies a connection between the idea of nature presented in these novels and the thought of the late-Victorian era regarding nature, primitivism, myth and the impulse behind mythopoesis. It is argued that this conceptual background is responsible for the notion of nature as a virtuous force of spiritual redemption in opposition to modernity and in particular to the dominant modern ideological model of scientific materialism. The thesis begins by examining late-Victorian sensibilities regarding myth and nature, before exposing correlative ideas in selected case studies of authors whose work it posits to be primarily mythopoeic in intent. The first of these studies considers the work of Henry Rider Haggard, the second examines Scottish writer David Lindsay, and the third looks at the mythopoeic endeavours of J. R. R. Tolkien, the latter standing alone among the authors considered in these central case studies in producing fiction under a fully developed theory of mythopoesis. The perspective is then widened in the final chapter, allowing consideration of authors such as William Morris and H. G. Wells. The study attempts to demonstrate the prevalence of an identifiable conceptual model of nature in the period it considers to constitute the age of early mythopoeic fantasy fiction, which it conceives to date from the late-Victorian era to the apotheosis of Tolkien’s work.