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Innocence Revisited: Nineteenth-Century Literature In The Works Of C. S. Lewis, Heather Louise Nation Hess

Doctoral Dissertations

Influence has long been a focus of scholarly work on C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), but this scholarly conversation largely neglects the nineteenth-century. In this project I will establish the profound influence of nineteenth-century texts, authors, and ideas on Lewis’s thought and work, arguing that the Romantic metanarrative—which traces the individual’s progression through innocence, experience, and higher innocence—provides the foundation for Lewis’s self-construction as well as his fictional work.

While the Romantics provide the initial concepts to Lewis, it is Victorian iterations of the Romantic metanarrative that Lewis most heavily revises. In his 2013 biography of Lewis, Alister McGrath suggests that …