Milton, Spenser and The Chronicles of Narnia: Literary Sources for the C.S. Lewis NovelsIn 1950, Clive Staples Lewis published the first in a series of children's stories that became The Chronicles of Narnia. The now vastly popular Chronicles are a widely known testament to the religious and moral principles that Lewis embraced in his later life. What many readers and viewers do not know about the Chronicles is that a close reading of the seven-book series reveals the strikingly effective influences of literary sources as diverse as George MacDonald's fantastic fiction and the courtly love poetry of the High Middle Ages. Arguably the two most influential sources for the series are Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Lewis was so personally intrigued by these two particular pieces of literature that he became renowned for his scholarly studies of both Milton and Spenser. This book examines the important ways in which Lewis so clearly echoes The Faerie Queen and Paradise Lost, and how the elements of each work together to convey similar meanings. Most specifically, the chapters focus on the telling interweavings that can be seen in the depiction of evil, female characters, fantastic and symbolic landscapes and settings, and the spiritual concepts so personally important to C.S. Lewis. |
From inside the book
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... Wardrobe would make an excellent second-place prize in my local Girl Scout Cookie–selling contest. I am very grateful that, in that particular race, I did not place first. Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi Preface 1 A Note on vi ...
... Wardrobe. It was a plain trade paperback, and though I didn't know the first thing about C.S. Lewis, I did recognize the title from having seen bits of the animated film on television while I recovered from a tonsillectomy the previous ...
... wardrobe may be a gateway to another world. Because of this, scholars, like myself, are returning to the stories we have loved since childhood and using our skills to produce a growing body of scholarship on Lewis's stories that treats ...
... Wardrobe . . . . . LWW Prince Caspian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PC The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” . . . . . . . . . VDT The Silver Chair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SC The Horse and His Boy ...
... wardrobe, or the resemblance The Silver Chair's Green Lady/Witch bears to Errour in Book I of The Faerie Queene. However, there are far more connected issues and more complex ways in which The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost overlap and ...
Contents
17 | |
The Depiction of Evil Men Mortals Monsters and Misled Protagonists | 51 |
Girls Whose Heads Have Something Inside Them The Characterization of Women | 77 |
An Inside Bigger Than Its Outside Setting and Geography | 107 |
Knowing Him Better There Spirituality and Belief | 135 |
Conclusion | 159 |
Chapter Notes | 163 |
Bibliography | 177 |
Index | 183 |