Thesis (M.A.)--Acadia University, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-85). Also available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

This thesis offers a re-evaluation of the fiction of George MacDonald (1824-1905), both fantasy and non-fantasy. The general trend in MacDonald studies is to focus primarily on his works of fantasy, either ignoring the rest (which includes non-fantasy fiction, sermons, poetry, and criticism) or using them to illuminate the fantasies. The overall critical consensus is that these works, particularly MacDonald’s non-fantasy fiction, possess little inherent value. Though many critics acknowledge similarities between MacDonald’s fantasy fiction and his non-fantasy fiction, MacDonald has been the victim of a critical double standard that treats fantasy and realism as completely irreconcilable, and allows certain features to be acceptable, even desirable, in one form that are completely unacceptable in the other. The thesis begins by looking at MacDonald’s writings about the imagination and about literature, from which a clear theory of literature emerges, one with strong opinions about the function and purpose of literature, as well as about what makes good literature. By re-examining MacDonald’s fiction, its plots, characterization and narration, in the light of his own theories, the reasons underlying the artistic choices made throughout his fiction take on a more deliberate and calculated appearance. Furthermore, by placing MacDonald in his proper context, and looking at the diversity of generic options available to the Victorian writer, the critical double standard underlying much MacDonald scholarship, based on a strict fantasy/realism separation, crumbles. What emerges from this analysis is a different MacDonald—a careful craftsman who consciously and skillfully uses the tools of his trade to produce a unique and specific reading experience.

George MacDonald (1824-1905) is one of the most complex and significant Scottish writers of the nineteenth century, especially as a writer of children's fiction and literary fairy tales. His works, however, have seldom been studied as Scottish literature. This dissertation is the first full-length analysis of his writings for children in their Scottish context, focusing particularly on his use of Scottish folklore in his literary fairy tales. MacDonald wrote in the Scottish Romantic tradition of Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and James Hogg; by close reading his works alongside similar texts by his compatriots, such as Andrew Lang, MacDonald's own idiosyncratic contribution to that tradition becomes more apparent. His profound knowledge of and appreciation for Christian mysticism is in evidence throughout his work; his use of folklore was directly informed by his exploration of mystical ideas. Hogg is recast as a second Dante, and ‘bogey tales' become catalysts for spiritual awakening. MacDonald's fairy tales deal sensitively and profoundly with the theme of child death, a tragedy that held personal significance for him, and can thus be read as his attempt to come to terms with the reality of bereavement by using Scottish folklore to explain it in mystical terms. Traditional figures such as Thomas Rhymer, visionary poets, and doubles appear in his fairy tales as guides and pilgrims out of the material world toward mystical union with the Divine.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1995. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-93).

This dissertation examines George MacDonald's preoccupation with his literary predecessor Percy Shelley. While eminently Victorian in many ways, MacDonald was equally a late Romantic, who was inspired by the Romantic poets and positioned himself as the heir to their radical tradition. While he channeled their visionary ardor, he also made it his duty to correct what he saw as their flaws. I read MacDonald through the figure of Shelley, with whom MacDonald seems to have personally identified, but to whose atheism MacDonald, a devout believer, objected. MacDonald's fascination with Shelley works its way into his fiction, which mythologizes literary history, offering fables about the transmission of the literary spirit down through the generations. Throughout his work, MacDonald resurrects Shelley in various guises, idealizing and reshaping Shelley into an image that is startlingly like MacDonald himself. This project contributes to MacDonald scholarship by offering a new approach to his work. It positions MacDonald, who is often portrayed as an ahistorical myth-maker, in an explicitly historical light, revealing him as a Victorian mythographer who was deeply invested in questions of literary criticism and historical succession. / Chapter 1 introduces MacDonald's concern with literary genealogy, and discusses how his work as a literary critic and historian idealizes Shefey. Chapter 2 examines how MacDonald's Phantastes portrays literary history as romantic quest, featuring Shelley as a heroic but fallen knight, and opening questions about literary fatherhood. Chapter 3 interprets the gothic tale "The Cruel Painter" as a myth about the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, in which MacDonald rewrites the story of Shelley's involvement with Mary Godwin and her father William Godwin. Chapter 4 considers Sir Gibbie and Donal Grant, works in which MacDonald explicitly critiques Shelley, and implicitly positions himself as the savior of the English literary tradition. Chapter 5 investigates MacDonald's later works, The Flight of the Shadow and Lilith, in which Shelley---and evil itself---become more complex entities. Throughout the dissertation, particular attention is given to the issue of repeating history vs. redeeming history, a tension that is reflected in MacDonald's use of vampire imagery to portray the unredeemed past.

The Victorian obsession with the child is also often, in the world of literary criticism at least, an obsession with death, whether the death of the child itself or simply the inevitable death of childhood as a seemingly Edenic state of being. This study seeks to consider the way in which the child figure, in texts by four authors published at the end of the nineteenth century, is aligned with an inversion of this relationship. For Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, and Henry James, the child is bound up instead with un-death, with a construction of death which seeks to remove the finitude, even the mortality, of death itself, or else a death which is expected or anticipated, yet always deferred. While in “The Child in the House” (1878) and “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), Pater places the child at the nexus of his construction of a death which is, rather than a finite ending, a return or a re-beginning, Lee's interest in the child figure's unique access to a world of art, explored in “The Child in the Vatican” (1883) and “Christkindchen” (1897) culminates in a dazzling vision of aesthetic transcendence with “Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child” (1906). MacDonald, for whom death is already never really death, uses the never-dead child figure in At The Back of the North Wind (1871) and Lilith (1895) as an embodiment of his own distinct engagement with aestheticism, as well as a means by which to express the simultaneous anticipation and depression he experienced in contemplation of death. Finally James, in What Maisie Knew (1897), explores the child's inherent monstrosity as he crafts the possibility of a childhood which consciously refuses to die. This study explores a trajectory in which the child’s place within such reconsiderations of death grows increasingly intense, reaching an apex with MacDonald’s fantastic worlds, before considering James’s problematisation of the concept of the un-dead child in What Maisie Knew.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1995. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-93).

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This thesis argues that George MacDonald's literary influence upon C. S. Lewis-concerning the themes of pain, suffering, evil and goodness-was transforming and long-lasting. It is argued in the opening chapter that MacDonald's work had a great deal to do with the change in young Lewis's imagination, helping to convert him from a romantic doubter to a romantic believer in God and his goodness. A review of both writers' first works suggests that such influence may have begun earlier in Lewis's career than has been noticed. The second chapter examines how both authors contended with the problems that pain and suffering present, and how both understood and presented the nature of faith. Differences in their treatment of these subjects are noted, but it is argued that these views and depictions share fundamental elements, and that MacDonald's direct influence can be demonstrated in particular cases. The view that MacDonald was primarily a champion of feelings is challenged, as is the idea that either man's later writing displays a loss of faith in God and his goodness. The third chapter, in specifically refuting the assertion that MacDonald's view of evil was inclusive in the Jungian or dualistic sense, shows how both authors' work maintains an unmistakable distinction between evil fortune and moral evil. The next two chapters examine fundamental similarities in their treatment of evil and goodness. Special care is taken in these two chapters to trace MacDonald's direct influence, especially regarding the differences they believed existed between hell's Pride and what they believed God to be. The fifth chapter reviews their ideas and depictions of heaven in summing up the study's argument concerning the overall influence of MacDonald's writing upon Lewis's imagination-in particular the change in Lewis's understanding of the relations between Spirits, Nature, and God.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Leland B. Jacobs. Dissertation Committee: Mildred L. Fairchild. A study of the children's works of George MacDonald, William Henry Hudson, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, John Ronald Renel Tolkien and Clive Staples Lewis--Cf. leaf 1. Includes bibliographical references.