A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare
1590
A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare
1590
George MacDonald was the Victorian writer who dared to defend fantasy when his contemporaries dismissed it as escapist nonsense. In these luminous essays, he mounts an impassioned case for imagination as essential to human flourishing, not a weakness to be suppressed. Written with poetic fervor and philosophical rigor, the collection explores how imagination operates as a way of seeing truth that cold logic cannot access. The Shakespeare essays reveal MacDonald as a critic of extraordinary sensitivity, reading the plays not as mere entertainment but as windows into deepest human experience. These fragments (the title "orts" means scraps or morsels) cohere into something greater than their parts: a vision of literature as vital, dangerous, necessary work. For readers who believe stories matter, who have felt the charge of encountering a world made anew through words.
