In mid twentieth century Britain, after the experience of total war, evil was not an abstract concept but a palpable reality. How was evil understood, and how did this understanding influence notions of English national identity? This thesis examines the lives and works of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien, members of the British literary club Inklings. It probes representations of evil, Englishness, gender and the erotic in their fiction and shows specifically how their science fiction, horror, and fantasy was a response to the moral and human devastation of two world wars. The thesis suggests that the Inkling’s middle brow literature opens a window on a wider sense of uncertainty and longing about Englishness in the eve of decolonization and decline.

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 (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Ian C. Fletcher, committee chair; Jared Poley, committee member. Electronic text (136 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Nov. 5, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-136).

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.

Par le biais de trois voix narratives distinctes, le roman raconte l’histoire de Tas-d’roches, l’homme fort du village de Saint-Nérée. Entre le pastiche rabelaisien, la poésie innue et le roman de chevalerie, multipliant les jeux de mise en page et de typographie, le récit traite des relations du héros avec sa famille, ses amis, le lieu qu’il habite et la femme de sa vie. Partant du constat que Tas-d’roches est un roman difficile à décrire, l’essai qui l’accompagne montre qu’une théorie méconnue et datée - mais étayée par des publications récentes dans les domaines de la neurologie (McGilclirist, 2009), de la phénoménologie (Bortoft, 2012) et de la linguistique (Guillaume, 2007) - selon laquelle tout texte exprime un degré de tension entre modes poétique et prosaïque de conscience (Barfield, 1928) permet de mettre en relation les aspects diégétiques et formels de Tas-d’roches et d’en offrir une description globalement satisfaisante.