Dream As A Phantast

George MacDonald's writing and works brought his wide recognition in his own day, and into the company of the time of Victorian, even nowadays mainly because of his extraordinary imagination. The paper aims to analyze his ideology of imagination from his essay about imagination, and causes to it, the embodiment of it, even its influence on the following writers.Chapter one discusses MacDonald's ideology about imagination in the light of his essay The Fantastic Imagination from two aspects:1) the first one is the law which governs the artistic creation of fairy stories and 2) the meaning of fairytales.Chapter two takes to investigate the causes of MacDonald's ideology of imagination, focusing on the status of children and the libration of imagination in the span of time from the end of the 19th century to the beginning years of 20th century. In such a period of the golden age of children's literature, children gained their right place gradually under the influence of Rousseau and Wordsworth. And many writers began to write for children. Moreover, after the Romantic Movement, imagination caught more attention from writers; many writers of children's literature tried to give imagination free expressions and achieved great success.Chapter three discusses the embodiment of imagination in MacDonald's works also from two aspects: one is the imaginative elements showed in his book; the other is the aesthetic effect of such fantastic constituents. In MacDonald's works always exists some absurd flavor which has two aesthetic effects: the satisfactory of desire, which can not be fulfilled in a realistic life; and the other is showing the game spirit which compensate and promote children's power of imagination.Chapter four pays more attention to MacDonald's influence on the following writers. Although it is true that MacDonald is far away from the fantastic writers, he has great influence on the following the writers even the genre of fantastic literature, which can not be ignored by people. Many fantastic writers get beneficial from MacDonald, such as C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien. In particular, Tolkien developed his view on fairy tales and forms a complete system of the concept of the secondary world which is best shown in his trilogy of The Lord of the Ring.