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The Art of Detection in a World of Change: "The Silver Chair" and Spenser Revisited
- Author(s):
- Charles A. Huttar (see profile)
- Date:
- 2014
- Group(s):
- GS Children’s and Young Adult Literature, LLC 16th-Century English, LLC 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone
- Subject(s):
- British literature, Children's literature, English literature, Religion
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- 20th Century Literature, Spenser, Inklings, detective fiction, C. S. Lewis
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6W03B
- Abstract:
- C. S. Lewis’s fourth Narnian chronicle is considered as detective fiction, illustrating principles for solving a murder mystery, especially alertness to the difference between appearance and reality. The human protagonists nearly fail through carelessness, overconfidence, and forgetfulness, combined with the deceit and magic of a shape-shifting villain, mistress of a Virgilian underworld, who wields spells of forgetfulness and the power to metamorphose her victims. (Echoes of Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Keats contribute to her characterization.) They are also misled by the ravages of time—a major theme also in Spenser’s “Cantos of Mutabilitie,” a text Lewis knew well. Success comes through a series of seeming accidents, arguably providential; then through obedience, courage, and faithful persistence despite radical uncertainty. Lewis presents “mystery” in a theological as well as a popular sense, and the dead king’s resurrection demonstrates (as in Spenser) the reduction of mutability itself to an instrument of divine creative power.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
- Share this:
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