Whenever we enter a fictional forest – whether in a film, a novel or a fairy tale – we know we’re bound for a story of adventure, possibly of danger, magic or transformation. 

Why is the forest such an evocative place in our stories? What does it stand for? And what does the imagined forest tell us about our relationship with actual forests, past and present? 

Here is my introduction to our series on the forests of the Western imagination, in which we discuss works by Dante, Shakespeare, Sondheim and Lapine and Toni Morrison.