Alan Garner and the work of time: (Twenty-First Century Perspectives)

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.

Table of Contents:

Foreword – Bob Fischer
Introduction: Alan Garner and the work of time – Robert Edgar, Wayne Johnson and John Marland
1 Placeworntime: wounds in the worlds of the Cheshire-Staffordshire border – Wayne Johnson
2 Alan Garner and folk fantasy in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen – Robert O’Connor
3 The view from the vanishing point: time, memory, and the eerie in Elidor – Christian Wilken
4 The melancholy matter of Britain: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service – Andrew M. Butler
5 ‘Aback of everything’: Time and myth in The Stone Book Quartet – Becky Long
6 Dancing on the Edge: Alan Garner’s Shamanic art in Thursbitch – John Marland
7 ‘We both look, but we see differently.’ History, Landscape and Eighteenth-Century Folk in Thursbitch – Adam James Smith
8 Boneland – Maureen Kincaid Speller (with an introduction by Paul Kincaid)
9 Are you alright, Colin?: Brisingamen to Boneland and back – Natalie Wilkins
10 Strandloper, Treacle Walker and Unified Field Theory – Robert Edgar
11 Circles in the eternal: practice, place and deep time in the work of Alan Garner – Fiona Cameron
Afterwords
Stones, bones, Mr Garner and me: reconsidering The Weirdstone of Brisingamen – Barbara Frost
Thin places: Where Shall We Run To? – Roz Morris

Robert Edgar is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture at York St John University
Wayne Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at York St John University
John Marland is Senior Lecturer in Literature at York St John University