C.S. Lewis famously wrote that reading George MacDonald’s Phantastes “baptized” his imagination. In this course, students will read a sampling of MacDonald’s theology, literary philosophy, and fairy tales, in particular Phantastes, and conclude with Lewis’s The Great Divorce, where Lewis gives MacDonald a parallel function in his allegorical dream vision to that of Virgil in Dante’s Comedy. We will seek to understand how reading MacDonald not only offers its own rewards, but also helps us to understand how MacDonald provided Lewis with the model for storytelling which in turn baptized the imagination of many Christian readers in his own works.


