Overview

Evil in the Christian Fantasy of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling: From the White Witch to the Dark Mark argues that The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter series are essential reading for anyone committed to understanding the cultural constructions of evil in twentieth-century Europe, and the strategies of resistance available to different types of readers in response to those evils. This book also suggests that while the construction of evil in both series can and should be approached through a secular lens, it cannot be fully understood without a complementary understanding of religious transcendence. Sarah Fiona Winters explores the tension between theological evil on the one hand, and naturalist and politico-historical representations of evil on the other; and the tension within both the explicitly religious and the apparently secular between dualism, the belief that good and evil both exist and are locked in combat, and the belief in orthodox Christianity that evil is nothing. She examines the developments in theories about evil that arose from the experience of the Second World War, particularly those of Hannah Arendt and Stanley Milgram in 1963, arguing that Lewis presented obedience as a strategy against evil because he wrote before their work while Rowling presents disobedience as a strategy against evil as she wrote after their work.

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9781666959772

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Sarah Fiona Winters is associate professor of English studies at Nipissing University in North Bay, Canada.

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