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C. S. Lewis is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but Lewis’s poetry tends to be treated separately from his other works, or as an antecedent to his more famous prose works. This thesis shows that Lewis’s paradoxical views of literary history, cultural death, reason and imagination are reflected in his narrative poems. George Watson says that Lewis was “a paradoxical thing, a conservative iconoclast, and he came to the task well-armed” (1). He is both a traditionalist and a rebel against his times. I explain Lewis’s paradoxes in terms of the concepts of history, memory, reason and imagination, and show that Lewis’s position was a negotiation of his own historical and cultural context. Lewis’s poems and scholarly work indicate that his approach to historical terms is first to underline divergence, and then to emphasize a use of seemingly polarized terms in order to unify them.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Flinders University, Dept. of English. / Typescript bound. Includes bibliographical references: (leaves 322-357) Also available electronically.

Thesis (M.A.(Creative Writing))--University of Western Australia, 2007.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1996. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-217).

C. S. Lewis is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but Lewis’s poetry tends to be treated separately from his other works, or as an antecedent to his more famous prose works. This thesis shows that Lewis’s paradoxical views of literary history, cultural death, reason and imagination are reflected in his narrative poems. George Watson says that Lewis was “a paradoxical thing, a conservative iconoclast, and he came to the task well-armed” (1). He is both a traditionalist and a rebel against his times. I explain Lewis’s paradoxes in terms of the concepts of history, memory, reason and imagination, and show that Lewis’s position was a negotiation of his own historical and cultural context. Lewis’s poems and scholarly work indicate that his approach to historical terms is first to underline divergence, and then to emphasize a use of seemingly polarized terms in order to unify them.

This study of Southey as a narrative poet will be based on an analysis of the five long poems, sometimes called epics, on which the poet laid his claim to fame in the field of narration.

The focus of this project is on poetry, narrative, landscape and myth, and the palimpsest and/or hybridisation created when these four areas overlay each other. Our local communities' engagement with myth-making activity provides a golden opportunity for contemporary poets to continue the practice long established by our forebears of utilising folklore and legendary material as sources for poetry. Keeping in mind the words of M. H. Abrams who said

The introduction contains separate studies of the manuscripts, their orthographies, the rhymes, metre and treatment of source material. Both the orthographic studies and the rhyme—grammar reveal Athis to be a CG poem with no real evidence of Rhenish provenance. The metrical studies, dealing with vowel collision and units of one and three syllables, show how the <u>Athis</u> poet pursued various legitimate rhythmic options in his attempt to introduce variation to the tedium of regular alternation. The most positive results emerge from the comparison of <u>Athis</u> with its OF source, the <u>Roman d'Athis</u>. The dependence of the German text on the OF poem can be proved through misunderstandings of lines and part—lines of the <u>Rd'A</u> enshrined in proper names in the German text. By far the most important aspect of the German poet's adaptation is his sense of history. Ancient Rome and Athens are presented in an entirely different way in the German text. In particular, the large scale descriptions of ceremonies and major events are scenically developed under the influence of medieval historiographic ideas. Further supplementary source material is provided by a Pseudo—Ovidian treatment of <u>Pyramus and Thisbe</u> and a number of medieval military and judicial customs associated with Roman models. In general <u>Athis</u> is shown to be indebted to a medieval German self—awareness of <u>Romanitas</u>.

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