Description
Employing a postmodernist literary approach, Kyoko Yuasa identifies C.S. Lewis both as an antimodernist and as a Christian postmodernist who tells the story of the Gospel to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers. Lewis is popularly known as an able Christian apologist, talented at explaining Christian beliefs in simple, logical terms. His fictional works, on the other hand, feature expressions that erect ambiguous borders between non-fiction and fiction, an approach similar to those typical in postmodernist literature. While postmodernist literature is full of micronarratives that deconstruct the Great Story, Lewis’s fictional world shows the reverse: in his world, micronarratives express the Story that transcends human understanding. Lewis’s approach reflects both his opposition to modernist philosophy, which embraces solidified interpretation, and his criticism of modernised Christianity. Here Yuasa brings to the fore Lewis’s focus on the history of interpretation and seeks a new model.
About the Author
Kyoko Yuasa is Lecturer of English Literature at Fuji Women’s University and Hokkaido Musashi Women’s College. She is the Japanese translator of Bruce L. Edwards’s A Rhetoric of Reading: C.S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy (2007).
Contents
Foreword by Bruce L. Edwards
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Harbinger of Christian Postmodernism
1. Philosopher of Christian Postmodernism
2. Novelist of Christian Postmodernism
3. Pre-Historic Magician Awakens in the Modernist Age
4. Medieval Paradise: East, West, and Beyond
5. Re-Writing Mythology: Greco-Roman and Norse
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Endorsements and Reviews
Kyoko Yuasa provides a scholarly overview of C.S. Lewis’s works, showing how he goes against the grain of modernism and rehabilitates values it has discarded. Based on her wide reading, and a detailed analysis of three of his novels, her argument that C.S. Lewis exemplifies a kind of Christian postmodernism will be helpful in challenging readers to reconsider Lewis in the context of modern thought and culture.
John Gillespie, Professor of French Language and Literature, School of Modern Languages, Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Ulster University
Kyoko Yuasa offers a fresh perspective for the twenty-first century on the works of C.S. Lewis. Her study of Lewis the anti-modernist ranges across the breadth of his writings and is both passionate and scholarly. I found her thorough explication of That Hideous Strength, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Till We Have Faces illuminating as she reveals their depth and richness by probing their roots in pre-Enlightenment literature.
Joy Alexander, School of Education, Queen’s University, Belfast
