Date of Award
8-2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School
Humanities
Committee Chair
Jameela Lares
Committee Chair School
Humanities
Committee Member 2
Joshua Bernstein
Committee Member 2 School
Humanities
Committee Member 3
Leah Parker
Committee Member 3 School
Humanities
Committee Member 4
Ery Shin
Committee Member 4 School
Humanities
Committee Member 5
Charles Sumner
Committee Member 5 School
Humanities
Abstract
C. S. Lewis’s reputation as a children’s author and Christian apologist has obscured his engagement with the cultural crises that defined literary modernism. This dissertation argues that Lewis should be understood as a counter-modernist writer. He shared modernist concerns about cultural fragmentation, participated actively in debates about tradition and innovation, and developed substantive literary responses to post-war crisis while proposing fundamentally different solutions than canonical modernists like T. S. Eliot.
Central to Lewis’s identity as a counter-modernist is a literary framework shaped by themes of annihilation, judgment, recognition, and renewal developed from his earliest work through his final fiction. This study terms this framework as his “apocalyptic imagination.” This apocalyptic imagination emerges in Spirits in Bondage (1919) where the young atheist Lewis processes his Great War experience through biblical imagery and Norse mythology. It matures through engagements with Eliot’s poetics, W. B. Yeats’s occult mythology and Charles Williams’s Christian esotericism, reaching its fullest expression in The Silver Chair (1953) and The Last Battle (1956). In these two Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis displays a “graduated apocalypse” that distinguishes localized catastrophe from cosmic conclusion.
Through close analysis of Lewis’s poetry, fiction, and essays alongside those of his contemporaries, this dissertation demonstrates that Lewis engaged the same epistemological crises that produced The Waste Land, responded to the totalitarian threats that preoccupied the culture, and participated in the intellectual networks that shaped canonical modernism. Lewis’s attempt to restore “stock responses” rather than create new meaning represents a rival proposal for addressing the post-war culture’s central problem of restoring meaning to “a heap of broken images.”
Copyright
Ian Alfred Pittman, 2026
Recommended Citation
Pittman, Ian Alfred, "The Last Dinosaur: C. S. Lewis's Counter-Modernism and the Apocalyptic Imagination" (2026). Dissertations. 2506.
https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/2506