Alan Garner and the work of time

This critical volume explores and reassesses Alan Garner’s significance as a writer, from mythic fantasy to landscape, memory, folklore, and the power of story. Alan Garner and the work of time is the first comprehensive critical volume dedicated to the work of a writer whose influence on British literature, across fantasy, folklore, landscape and place writing and experimental fiction, has been profound but under-analysed. Spanning over six decades, Garner’s oeuvre is marked by its distinctive engagement with landscape, language, myth, and temporality. Bringing together a range of writers and scholars, this collection re-evaluates Garner’s significance amid renewed interest in folk horror, ecocriticism, hauntology, and the narrative function of myth. It includes analysis of his fiction, ranging from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to Treacle Walker, alongside his autobiographical and non-fiction writing, foregrounding thematic and formal innovations across his body of work. This volume interrogates Alan Garner’s contribution to the literary imagination and situates him within wider critical conversations about story, memory, place, and identity. It offers analysis of a publicly loved yet critically long-neglected author, positioning Garner not merely as a major writer of fantasy, but as a key figure in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature. Alan Garner has been described by Philip Pullman as ‘the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien’. This book is the first collected edition to critically analyse Garner’s body of work. This comprehensive analysis stretches from Garner’s early work, from the straightforward magical world of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) to the more challenging ‘adolescent fiction’ of The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973). It then moves to analysis of Garner’s subsequent corpus of work that is remarkable for both its thematic continuity and imaginative range, including Strandloper (1996), Thursbitch (2003) and Boneland (2012). His most recent novel, Treacle Walker, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and recent criticism centred on folk horror and hauntology has reignited a critical and public acknowledgement of Garner’s work.

Pagina's: 204, Hardcover, Manchester University Press (P648)