『나니아 연대기』와 「쾌활한 사람」, 「사색하는 사람」에 구현된 세례받은 상상력

초록

Regardless of time difference of three hundred years, John Milton and C. S. Lewis share a similar literary code in their ideas and philosophy on the issue of “myth.” As Milton who lived in the English Renaissance period focused on the ideas of history, culture, and nation, Lewis as one of the twentieth century famous writers and scholars also taught the same topics in the Medieval and Renaissance literature at the Cambridge and Oxford University. Furthermore, they both acknowledged their identity as Christian writers whose aim is to produce and spread the discourse of Christianity. Among several similarities, their fascination with the Greek-Roman mythology and the use of pagan elements in their literary texts are worthy of attention, not because they are regarded themselves as Christian writers, but because they employed the Greek-Roman myth as fictitious elements in comparison with Christian ideas as the factual truths. Thus, this paper aims at analyzing the literary aspects of the “myth” embodied in both Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia in order to understand the in-depth meanings and insights about these writers’ ideas of Christianity. This paper also shows that a classical text like Milton’s could be reincarnated in a popular literature like Lewis’s works in the contemporary times. The first part examines how Milton and Lewis represent the real world the Renaissance and World War II respectively. The second part analyses how Milton and Lewis discover the limitations of the mythical world. These limitations lead them to search the ultimate imaginative mythical world. The third part explores Miton and Lewis’s understandings of the “Baptized Imagination” that is the knowledge of Reality which could help human beings avoid the “human dilemma,” the knowledge about Reality, and introduce to the ultimate imaginative mythical world. The final part investigates the concepts of the “Baptized Imagination” and the “Myth became Fact” that are represented in the texts of Milton and Lewis. As Milton and Lewis embody the progress of the “Myth became Fact,” the conclusion discusses how they achieve their goals in which the readers experience complete and ultimate mythical world.

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