This thesis aims to demonstrate the unique ways in which ‘liminal fantasies’ by John Crowley and M. John Harrison challenge the typical escapist and representational modes of reading fantasy, and instead promote new ways of engaging with reality. Drawing on concepts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and the concept of ‘liminal fantasy’ as established in Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy, this thesis investigates how Harrison’s novels The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) and The Course of the Heart (1992) and John Crowley’s novel Little, Big (1982) and Ægypt series (1987-2007) each problematise their characters’ desire (or lack thereof) for fantasy (or meaning) in their narratives by failing to resolve the ontological balance between the fantastic and the mundane. By leaving signification (be it fantastic or mundane) liminally balanced, both Crowley and Harrison ‘short circuit’ the transcendent methods of interpretation that pose a specific way of reading each text. Furthermore, by applying Deleuze’s philosophy to the fantasy genre alongside notions such as surface reading and ‘writerly’ texts in a way that has not been done before, it is possible to see how both Crowley’s and Harrison’s works affirm life through immanence precisely because they are not restricted to a fixed, transcendent signification. Life, and the affectual experience of living, is a process of continual change not bound by any single fixed idea. As such, each reader can use the texts to ‘become’ and produce new ways of interacting with the actual world through fantasy’s equivalence with ‘virtual’ concepts such as affect, ideology, and history. The actual, here, is the immanent world as it is lived, as opposed to the transcendent fantasies of escape that not only dictate how people live but limit the perspectives of those who believe in them. By problematising the relationship between the fantastic and the mundane within literature, both Crowley and Harrison are able to affirm life as an immanent process, an important feat in a world overflowing with avenues of escape.