Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature

Аннотация

In Iris Murdoch's The Flight From the Enchanter (1956), the second of her twenty-six published novels, the mysterious Mischa Fox describes his belief in "the way in which magic can be part of ordinary life" (Murdoch, FE, 192). Murdoch (1919-1 999), and her contemporaries Margaret Drabble (b. 1939) and A.S. Byatt (b. 1936), refer to the magic of fairy tales frequently in their fiction. In various ways, they respond to an essential theme of those very old stories that maintains its relevance for modern readers: the movement of a disenfranchised hero towards community.