Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Deeper Magic: Theology Of The Body In C. S. Lewis And John Paul Ii, George French

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

C. S. Lewis tells us that science and magic are “twins.” “They were born,” he says “of the same impulse”3 of man to master the natural world. We think of them very differently because science has succeeded where magic has failed, but that should not make us blind to their “strong family likeness.”4 Science and magic are intertwined for much of their history, and it is in the Enlightenment that the two begin to separate. While magic died and science survived, Lewis thinks that modern applied science still retains much of the “family likeness.” Unfortunately, not all of the family …

N.I.C.E. Alchemy: The Quest For Immortality In That Hideous Strength, Joseph Weigel

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

In the third and final chapter of The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis makes what may be one of the most provocative statements in his entire corpus of writings: “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavor are twins. . . . They were born of the same impulse.”1 This claim is jarring because science and magic are thought of as opposites. One seeks knowledge through observation, the other deals in spells, rites, and incantations. However, Lewis recognized something deeper that united the two disciplines. The impulse for “magic and applied science alike,” he continued in Abolition, “is …

One Dominant Age: The Technological Singularity In The Abolition Of Man, Christopher Tissell

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of the third part of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Much ink has been spilled analyzing Lewis’s thoughts on the dangers of subjectivism as outlined in the first two parts of the book, but less so on the endpoint to which Lewis thinks subjectivism leads when whole societies succumb to it. Yet Lewis himself, or at least his editor, thought the final part important enough to name the lecture series after it, and dramatize it in a novel afterward. If Lewis saw the train leaving the station over …

The Abolition Of Man, Eighty Years Later: An Engineer’S Perspective, Paul G. Lorenzini

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

I n 2021 Michael Ward published After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. His purpose was to call attention to the continuing relevance and significance of Lewis’s book, originally published in 1943, now almost a century old. Among his many works, it is one of the least known, yet it was perhaps Lewis’s most highly acclaimed book among secular critics. Ranked seventh by the National Review in its list of 100 best non-fiction books in the 20th century, it is second on a similar list by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.1 While Abolition can be a difficult …

C. S. Lewis’S Most Important Message: The Abolition Of Man As Lewis’S Self-Conscious Struggle For The Value Of Human Persons, Dwain Tissell

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Over the roughly sixty years since C. S. Lewis’s death, many have asked, what was the message he most wanted to convey? A decade before Lewis’s passing, Dr. James Houston asked him that very question. Lewis answered that he was fighting “reductionism.” More specifically, Houston heard C. S. Lewis to be most concerned about reduction of the value of the human person. At the time of this writing, Houston is 101 years of age, and he has kept a low profile all these years about his relationship with C. S. Lewis. From 1947 until 1954, he and Lewis were more …

The Importance Of Recognizing Truth, Goodness, And Beauty: C. S. Lewis’S Antidote To The Poison Of Subjectivism, David H. Mcilroy

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

T aken in isolation, The Abolition of Man is different from most of C. S. Lewis’s other works. It is not a work of fiction or a work of expressly Christian apologetics. It is, however, rightly recognized by Dyer and Watson as “the lynchpin for understanding of all of [Lewis’s] work.”1 The thesis set out in The Abolition of Man is foundational to C. S. Lewis’s worldview. Lewis explored its implications in the third novel in his scientific trilogy, That Hideous Strength, which Lewis expressly described as a story whose moral was “the serious “point” which I have tried to …

Gender And The Abolition Of Man: The Masculine And The Feminine In Lewis’S Natural Law Thought, Joshua P. Herring

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

C. S. Lewis wrote extensively about gender in both nonfiction and fiction works. In nonfiction, he lays out a specific understanding of gender with logical clarity; in fiction, Lewis develops a series of poetic images magnifying the depth of meaning found in being masculine and feminine. In both forms of writing, Lewis celebrates the goodness of God’s gift of gender, and summons his readers to receive the gift with gratitude. Reading Lewis’s works on gender functions as an antidote to gender ideology. Rather than a severing of felt experience and bodily reality, Lewis calls his readers to see the ideas …

The Positive Educational Program Of The Abolition Of Man, Jon Fennell

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Readers of The Abolition of Man, certainly those who have engaged it repeatedly and have thought deeply about what it says, recognize that the book is fundamentally a commentary on the reality—and predictable consequences—of the miseducation of the young. Much has been written on this topic. Not so commonly recognized, nor as frequently understood, is the positive educational program that arises out of Lewis’s largely critical “reflections on education.”2 The Abolition of Man, like its fictional counterpart, That Hideous Strength, elaborates a nightmare scenario. That scenario is the product of what, logically, is a reduction and absurdum. The details of …

The Eschatological Vision Of The Abolition Of Man, Joshua J. Paladino

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man is ultimately an eschatological work, a vision of the end of history, a warning about the fully conditioned society, an insight into the nature of the universal and homogeneous state, and even a prophecy of Hell on Earth. The end-times significance of the Abolition is perhaps overlooked because it lacks an apocalyptic framing. Lewis presented, rather, a “snug” eschatology.1 There is none of the apocalyptic drama that Lewis crafted in The Last Battle. We do not hear the Lion roar, “Now it is time,” before watching Father Time squeeze the sun in his …

The Riddle Of The Sphinx, Owen Barfield, Rory O'Connor

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Owen Barfield, whom C. S. Lewis described archetypally as his “Second Friend” —“the man who disagrees with you about everything . . . not so much the alter ego as the antiself ”1 —expressed his agreement with the argument of The Abolition of Man and his admiration of the book on a number of occasions. For example, describing various means by which one can become aware of the presuppositions of one’s thoughts, Barfield once wrote: One, of which the best example I know is C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, is to take some typical utterance by a contemporary …

In Memoriam: J. Stanley Mattson (1937–2024), Gayne J. Anacker

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

John Stanley (Stan) Mattson will be best remembered for what he accomplished as the Founder and President of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. Those who knew him best would add that what he accomplished flowed from who he was as a person and as a child of God.

Frontmatter (Volume 18 Issue 1), Bruce R Johnson

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

General Editor’s Note:

C. S. Lewis delivered a series of lectures in February 1943 for the University of Durham, published the month prior as The Abolition of Man. It remains a robust defense of moral law and objective values against the onslaught of what Lewis soon labeled “The Poison of Subjectivism.” He argued that children who are not schooled in ancient wisdom regarding mercy, justice, beneficence, and duty become not simply self-centered adults but easily manipulated people. A society bent on pursuing such a path becomes a society in peril.

Last year’s issue of Sehnsucht included a call for papers …

Critics And Champions; Woolf's And Forster's Novel's Connection, Sarah Timm '28

Best First-Year Seminar Writing

Although Virginia Woolf’s and E.M. Forster’s relationship was not as widely discussed or scrutinized as were other relationships between Bloomsbury Group members, Woolf’s and Forster’s association contributed to both novelists’ lasting literary success. Despite having held various—and often conflicting—opinions of each other, Woolf and Forster conversed frequently and engaged in a decades-long debate over form, character, and art in novels. Since Woolf and Forster were both critics and champions of each other’s work, their debates and willingness to question each other contributed to their growth as writers and reviewers. An exploration of the personal and professional relationship between Woolf and …

Reading, Rending, And Queering The Web Of Story With The Lenses Of “Con-Creation” And Process Theology, Cameron Bourquein, Nick Polk

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

“Sub-creation” within Tolkien’s narrative and extra-narrative works is routinely exhibited not as monolithic but rather as (literally and figuratively) polyphonic. In this joint paper Bourquein proposes that the Legendarium can be read through the lens of “con-creation” (total, continuous, collective, creative activity) both internally (as events in the Secondary World) and externally (as both a text and a pseudohistory in the Primary World). This approach levels the playing field between all actors in—and readers of—“The Drama,” providing a queer approach to interpretive-creative activity when compared to “orthodox” doctrines of creation. Polk further argues that con-creation resonates with process theologies of …

Towards An Ethos Of Discussing In-Corporeal Gender In Fantasy Literature: Part I—A 'Feminine' Eldil And A 'Masculine' Vala, Luke Shelton

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people engaged with others on social media in ways that they had not before. During this time, many new interpretive communities arose. In one of these conversations, the way that fans interpreted Tolkien’s description of the physical characteristics of the Valar resonated with a passage in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra (the second book of his Space Trilogy) where the narrator describes the physical manifestation of Perelandra and Malacandra. In this paper I perform a close read of the two passages, to examine the textual meaning, to see what interpretive room there is in …

The English And The Welsh: Tolkien’S Rewriting Of History In The Legendarium, Alexander Retakh

Journal of Tolkien Research

Early legendarium is often called a "mythology for England," while Tolkien's later tales have been described as mythologies for Britain (by Dimitra Fimi) or Englishness (by Thomas Honegger). Later legendarium still contains fictional versions of English-like peoples, the Hobbits and the Rohirrim. Their construction leads to a re-construction of elements of English history in the subcreation, that often produces fictional analogs not only of the English but of the Welsh. How Tolkien described contacts between the English and their closest neighbors reveals his idea of Englishness (his own national identity) and its place in the narrative.

This article traces appearances …

Uncovering Maria Edgeworth’S Strategic Political Influence Through Her Unpublished Letters, Autumn G. Hall

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was one of the most prolific Anglo-Irish novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While Edgeworth’s novels are regularly discussed among Regency-era scholars, researchers have rarely considered her letters and correspondence, especially in relation to her role in contemporary politics. During my time on the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project team, I researched Edgeworth’s previously unpublished letters, which provided a unique view of her strategic political correspondence network. Through her writing, Edgeworth was able to voice her thoughts while also remaining publicly complacent with restrictive societal norms imposed on women. In my article, I argue that through her …

The Nameless Enemy: How Do You Solve A Problem Like “Mairon”?, Cameron Bourquein

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper analyzes Sauron’s “original” name, “Mairon,” in its various contexts (textual, temporal, and linguistic) and then applies it to a reading of the character in order to produce a “capsule characterization” or “minimyth” for the Lord of the Rings himself. The name “Mairon” appears only in a note to a single entry in a list of Eldarin roots, not published until 2007 in the journal Parma Eldalamberon. This niche location suggests one of the many ways in which this name is marginal: typographically, linguistically, narratively, and historically (as in the Secondary World). The name appears to have been …

The Songs Of The Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien And The Overlapping Realms Of Their Imaginations (2024), Edited By Łukasz Neubauer And Guglielmo Spirito, G. Connor Salter

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by G. Connor Salter, of The Songs of the Spheres: Lewis, Tolkien and the Overlapping Realms of their Imaginations (2024), edited by Łukasz Neubauer and Guglielmo Spirito

All That May Become A Man: Dynamics Of Gender And Violence In Macbeth, Lauren M. Schuster

West Chester University Master’s Theses

The text of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is rife with the language of gender crisis, with the titular character and his wife struggling against the repressive nature of patriarchal gender norms. It is this conflict between individual gender expression and societal ideals of gender that underscores the play’s central conflict, with Lady Macbeth’s rejection of typical femininity as an inciting force for the murder of King Duncan and the chaos that follows. In my reading of Macbeth, I focus on the rhetoric of material sex and gender performativity. In doing so, I examine what such rhetoric suggests about the patriarchal structures …