The ScholAIr

The Ache as Architecture: Longing, Enchantment, and the Postmodern Metaphysical Imagination in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn Abstract This essay argues that Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) occupies a pivotal position in the history of Anglophone mythopoeic fiction: it inherits J. R. R. Tolkien’s elegiac metaphysical architecture yet transmutes that inheritance into something distinctly post-Tolkienian—a phenomenology of longing that relocates transcendence from cosmological structure to the transformative interiority of individual consciousness. Through close attention to the novel’s principal figures—the Unicorn, Schmendrick, Molly Grue, King Haggard, Prince Lir, and Mommy Fortuna—the essay maps a topology of enchantment in which each character embodies a distinct mode of desire: developmental consummation, dignified dis-enchantment, predatory negation, self-dispossessing heroism, and the management of wonder as spectacle. Situating Beagle wit...