It also brings home the central place of MacDonald’s writings in British children’s literature by pointing to the influence that MacDonald may have had on such writers as Edith Nesbit, Philippa Pearce, and Neil Gaiman. The introduction briefly relates MacDonald’s life and his works, from novels and children’s stories to his volumes of poetry and sermons. At the Back of the North Wind is indeed a significant example in MacDonald’s career and shows how fantasy enabled him to defamiliarize the real, as the editors stress in the introduction. Stephen Prickett, famous for his groundbreaking Victorian Fantasy (1979) among other works, makes explicit from the start that At the Back of the North Wind deals first and foremost with Victorian social conditions, from poverty to disease, yet combines realism with fantasy and draws on biblical imagery. The edition contains a preface by Stephen Prickett, an introduction, a chronology, abundant textual annotations, and numerous appendixes. It not only presents to readers the text as published in the 1871 one-volume Strahan edition but also places MacDonald’s work within a wider nineteenth-century culture, pointing out MacDonald’s possible influences and sources and underlining the importance of illustrations in the fantasy. This new edition of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind offers an insight into the world of Victorian children’s classics.
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