He returned to it again and again, claiming in later years that Phantastes had shaped his philosophy of life and even his vocational attitude more than any other book. Lewis, who said the journey of Anodos showed him holiness and “baptized” his imagination. Reading this short novel radically impacted C. Within the realm of faerie, he begins to build a completely different way of engaging with the world and to adopt a whole new understanding of honor and even of self.
I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.What happens when a self-assured university student comes home as a “chivalric” English gentleman, ready to assume responsibility for his sisters and the family estate, but somehow wakes up the next morning as a stranger in Fairyland?Ĭome join us on an adventure in which the young Anodos is forced to reassess his assumptions about both himself and others–and eventually to deconstruct his entire concept of a hero. Lewis wrote, concerning his first reading of Phantastes at age sixteen, "That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized the rest of me not unnaturally, took longer. The edition published in 1905 was illustrated by Pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes.Ĭ.S.
Anodos lives through many adventures and temptations while in the other world, until he is finally ready to give up his ideals. The story concerns a young man who is pulled into a dreamlike world and there hunts for his ideal of female beauty, embodied by the "Marble Lady".
The story centres on the character Anodos ("pathless", or "ascent" in Greek) and takes its inspiration from German Romanticism, particularly Novalis. It was later reprinted in paperback by Ballantine Books as the fourteenth volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in April 1970. Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women is a fantasy novel by Scottish writer George MacDonald, first published in London in 1858. Wikipedia Rate this definition: 0.0 / 0 votes
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