Dreaming into hyperspace: the Victorian spatial imagination and the origins of modern fantasy in MacDonald and Carroll

This chapter posits that the origins of the modern fantasy genre can be located in the Victorian correlation between the space of dreams and the supernatural world, and the Victorian's exploration of these spaces through the new development of non-Euclidean geometry and its related notions of higher-dimensional space, or hyperspace. Using historicised literary analysis, this chapter identifies crucial turning points in the literary exploration of these ideas in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and George MacDonald’s Phantastes and Lilith. Through their exploration of these new kinds of spaces, this chapter argues, these texts mark the emergence of the secondary worlds associated with the modern fantasy genre.