A hobgoblin is charged with the protection of an unloving Puritan family who come to live at an English manor in 1652.

From the internationally best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, a spellbinding journey into the secrets of his art--the narratives that have shaped his vision, his experience of writing, and the keys to mastering the art of storytelling. One of the most highly acclaimed and best-selling authors of our time now gives us a book that charts the history of his own enchantment with story--from his own books to those of Blake, Milton, Dickens, and the Brothers Grimm, among others--and delves into the role of story in education, religion, and science. At once personal and wide-ranging, Daemon Voices is both a revelation of the writing mind and the methods of a great contemporary master, and a fascinating exploration of storytelling itself.

Katharine Briggs enjoys an unchallenged reputation in the world of folklore studies. The theme of this volume, the witch figure as a malevolent intermediary in folk belief, was chosen to reflect that aspect of Briggs's scholarship exemplified in her study of witchcraft, Pale Hecate's Team. The contributors draw on the disciplines of archaeology, comparative religion, sociology and literature and include: Carmen Blacker, H.R. Ellis Davidson, Margaret Dean-Smith, L.V. Grinsell, Christina Hole, Venetia Newall, Geoffrey Parrinder, Anne Ross, Jacqueline Simpson, Beatrice White, John Widdowson. Originally published in 1973.

Katharine Briggs made an indelible mark on the world of folklore with her compilation of the Dictionary of British Folktales in the English Languages, while her subsequent Dictionary of Fairies confirmed her already distinguished place among British Folklorists. Briggs’s initial academic interest while at Oxford University was in seventeenth-century literature and the Civil War. Upon leaving Oxford she pursued amateur dramatics and worked for the Guide Movement, and during the Second World War she served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. It was here, perhaps, that her personality fully matured; among other activities she delighted her fellows with her remarkable gift for story-telling. After the war, her career as a folklorist began to blossom. As if to make up for lost time, she spent the last twenty years of her life writing and lecturing almost continually. As well as her books on folklore, she gained renown for her children’s books Kate Crackernuts and Hobberdy Dick. She was responsible for revitalising the Folklore Society and as its President, she laid the foundations of the Society as it is today. Hilda Davidson’s biography brings to life a remarkable woman whose combination of academic excellence and natural gift for narrative found her friends all over the world.

The letters found in Volume II reveal inside accounts of how The Screwtape Letters came to be written, the early meetings of the Inklings (with J.R.R. Tolkien giving readings about "hobbits" and "Middle Earth"), how C.S. Lewis became popular through BBC radio talks, but mostly how this quiet professor in England touched the lives of many through an amazing discipline of personal correspondence.

In this, the first book on English fantasy, Colin Manlove shows that for all its immense diversity, English fantasy can best be understood in terms of its strong national character, rather than as an international genre. Showing its development from Beowulf to Blake, the author describes English fantasy's modern growth through secondary world, metaphysical, emotive, comic, subversive, and children's fantasy. In them all England has led the world, with authors as different as Chaucer, Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Salman Rushdie.

Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.

This book provides a new critical methodology for the study of landscapes in children's literature. Treating landscape as the integration of unchanging and irreducible physical elements, or topoi, Carroll identifies and analyses four kinds of space — sacred spaces, green spaces, roadways, and lapsed spaces — that are the component elements of the physical environments of canonical British children’s fantasy. Using Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence as the test-case for this methodology, the book traces the development of the physical features and symbolic functions of landscape topoi from their earliest inception in medieval vernacular texts through to contemporary children's literature. The identification and analysis of landscape topoi synthesizes recent theories about interstitial space together with earlier morphological and topoanalytical studies, enabling the study of fictional landscapes in terms of their physical characteristics as well as in terms of their relationship with contemporary texts and historical precedents. Ultimately, by providing topoanalytical studies of other children’s texts, Carroll proposes topoanalysis as a rich critical method for the study and understanding of children’s literature and indicates how the findings of this approach may be expanded upon. In offering both transferable methodologies and detailed case-studies, this book outlines a new approach to literary landscapes as geographical places within socio-historical contexts.

Recounts the author's life on a farm in a secret Welsh valley seeking rural characters for her radio program.

A comprehensive study of children's fantasy literature across the English-speaking world, from the sixteenth century to the present.