C.S. Lewis

The works of C.S. Lewis have a wide appeal to a variety of audiences. Lewis is probably most famous for the best-selling The Chronicles of Narnia, although William Nicholson’s Shadowlands will have led many readers to Lewis’s own account of his tragic bereavement in A Grief Observed. However, Shadowlands represents only a small part of Lewis’s controversial life, and omits much that is crucial to an understanding of this fascinating, and in some ways tormented, personality. Lewis enjoyed (to the chagrin of his academic colleagues) a tremendous success as a popular theologian. He was also a successful science fiction writer. And last, but by no means least, he was a brilliant and original academic in the field of English Studies. This book weaves together the very different elements in the complex phenomenon of C.S Lewis, and relates the central concerns of Lewis’s life and work to current thinking about postmodernism, psychoanalysis and the idea of ‘a new Humanism’.