An ever-expanding critical library on fantasy fiction requires an analysis of why the genre is so ubiquitous, enduring and beloved. This work analyzes the mythic elements in foundational fantasy texts, arguing that mythopoeic fantasy reveals timeless truths that link human cultures past and present. Through close readings of works like Phantastes, The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Neverending Story, A Wrinkle in Time and Out of the Silent Planet, this book explores how mythopoeic fantasy speaks to the deepest concerns of the human heart. It investigates the genre's use of an imagination that is sometimes atrophied by the demands of contemporary life, and explores how fantasy provides restoration, consolation and hope within a cultural context that too often decries such ideas. Each chapter focuses on a representative text, providing author background and engaging relevant scholarship on a variety of relevant thematic issues. Offering new insights on these classic texts by drawing upon post-secular critical approaches, this work is suitable for both new and seasoned students of fantasy.

J. R. R. Tolkien is arguably the most influential fantasy writer of all time--his world building and epic mythology have changed Western audiences' imaginations and the entire fantasy genre. This book is the first wide-ranging Christian Platonic reading on Tolkien's fiction. This analysis, written for scholars and general Tolkien enthusiasts alike, discusses how his fiction is constructed on levels of language, myth and textuality that have a background in the Greek philosopher Plato's texts and early Christian philosophy influenced by Plato. It discusses the concepts of ideal and real, creation and existence, and fall and struggle as central elements of Tolkien's fiction, focusing on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth. Reading Tolkien's fiction as a depiction of ideal and real, from the vision of creation to the process of realization, illuminates a part of Tolkien's aesthetics and mythology that previous studies have overlooked.

This book makes connections between mythopoeic fantasy--works that engage the numinous--and the critical apparatuses of ecocriticism and posthumanism. Drawing from the ideas of Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy, mythopoeic fantasy is a means of subverting normative modes of perception to both encounter the numinous and to challenge the perceptions of the natural world. Beginning with S.T. Coleridge's theories of the imagination as embodied in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the book moves on to explore standard mythopoeic fantasists such as George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Taking a step outside these men, particularly influenced by Christianity, the concluding chapters discuss Algernon Blackwood and Ursula Le Guin, whose works evoke the numinous without a specifically Christian worldview.

David Neal Miller's Fear of Fiction is the first book-length study that begins with the understanding that Singer is truly a Yiddish writer in language and culture. With the exception of a handful of articles, American critical examination of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work has been devoted to Singer's work in English—to those pieces he himself has selected for translation. This American Nobel laureate is part of a long tradition of Yiddish literature, and he still writes in that language. Working exclusively with Singer's Yiddish texts—many of the pieces discussed here are not available in English—Miller examines Singer's narrative strategies, his blurring of the distinctions between fiction and reportage. Fear of Fiction captures an intriguing paradox of Singer's writing: Singer fictionalizes the factual and historicizes the imaginative. Miller demonstrates that Singer is no "inspired innocent," but that this blending of genres is the work of a craftsman who uses genre to mediate between the world and the imagination. The book is enriched by Miller's careful and sensitive translations of many illustrative Yiddish passages. Fear of Fiction is both erudite and entertaining. Miller not only examines Singer's skillful undermining of our expectations of different genres, but also draws the reader into Singer's work as a whole. This book will fascinate both the scholar and the sophisticated reader of Singer.