A Study of English Fantasy Novels in the 19th Century: Focus on Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald

19세기 영국 판타지소설 연구 -루이스 캐럴과 조지 맥도널드를 중심으로

There was a Golden Age of Fantasy novels in the United Kingdom in the 19th Century, which had the major writers, Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald. These writers pushed the boundaries of imagination and created a new world in which explore their own selves and societies. Fantasy novels flowered in the 1860s when a group of writers including Carroll and MacDonald published their works. These writers used the trait of dream framing to create their own fantasy world in which they took the action against the complicated and oppressive Victorian reality. Carroll's fantasy worlds of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were an insane and chaotic world where the certainty of the real world was overturned. MacDonald's dream worlds of At the Back of the North Wind and the Princess books including The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie were ideal societies in which imaginative characters could create harmony between fantasy and reality. Fantasy writers engaged in making journey to other lands to do philosophical and moral discussion critiquing Victorian society and to find insights into those problems in their works. Thus, their fantasy journey traverses time and place can produce some suggestive answers to the questions that lie in other times and realities as well as theirs.