Abstract
Michael Moorcock is one of England's most prolific and popular authors. He has a cult following and an active international appreciation society. Moorcock has won British Fantasy Awards Nebula awards, a World Fantasy Award, a John W. Cambell Memorial Award and a nomination for the Whitbread Prize and yet he has never achieved great literary status. Moorcock is both avant-garde and popular, translated into many languages, yet his novels rarely reach the best-sellers lists or university reading lists in Britain. One might argue that he is ahead of his time, or too experimental for the general public, but the most obvious reason for his marginalisation has something to do with the suspicion still felt towards science fiction and fantasy with which he is associated. Not only did he practically invent modem fantasy and reshape science fiction, but he is also an exponent of mainstream literature. This ignorance regarding one of England's greatest writers reveals a fallacy and problem with our culture's reception of literature. Using Moorcock as my focus, the thesis also interrogates fantasy as an undervalued literary impulse. Since the Enlightenment, western culture has placed more value on rational thinking and demanded a more exact form of naturalistic representation in its artistic expressions. Since then symbolism and myth have been regarded with some suspicion and, today, fantasy suffers from the same prejudice. Fantasy has something important to offer our culture in terms of re-evaluating its heritage and offering insight into a more mystical and spiritual reality. Moorcock, as a writer, explores themes and subjects which others dare not confront. He is also an elusive and protean writer whose works blur the generic boundaries.