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Essay on C. S. Lewis Works

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C. S. Lewis was a celebrated academic in the field of medieval literature, first at Oxford University, then at Cambridge, where he held the first chair in medieval and Renaissance literature. He also was a noted convert to Christianity who in the 1940’s established himself as a popular Christian apologist with a series of wartime radio talks, later collected under the title Mere Christianity (1952). Between 1938 and 1945 he wrote a trilogy of science-fiction books (the Space Trilogy, consisting of Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943; and That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grownups, 1945) with underlying Christian themes. He was still unmarried in the early 1950’s, living with his brother and an elderly widow and …show more content…

However, the publishers, Geoffrey Bles, like today’s filmmakers, decided to space them out to one per year. He had found a young illustrator, Pauline Baynes, for the first book and asked her to stay with the series. After the series was published, Lewis received the 1957 Carnegie Medal, Britain’s most prestigious award for children’s literature, for the last chronicle, The Last Battle. Some have argued the award was really for the whole series, but in many ways, The Last Battle really is the best of the seven stories. The order of reading the Chronicles which Lewis recommended is not the order in which they were written or published. Lewis suggested that new readers start with The Magician’s Nephew, which tells of the creation of Narnia. This should be followed by The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, then The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and finally The Last Battle, which tells the story of the Narnian world brought to an end. Four of the stories deal with children entering the parallel, or secondary, world of Narnia, setting disorder to right, and then returning to their own world, only to find that no time at all has elapsed there. One of the novels presents an adventure that happens purely within Narnia; one tells a story of secondary world spilling over into the children’s primary world of England; and in one, The Last Battle, all the previous “friends of

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