Categorising C.S. Lewis's Literary Theory

Abstract

C.S. Lewis's two volumes of literary theory are compared and contrasted with the particular works in mainstream twentieth century literary theory that they most closely resemble. The Personal Heresy is akin to, but ultimately divergent from, the New Critical papers ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’. Likewise An Experiment in Criticism is akin to reader-response theories of the phenomenological variety, especially those of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, and Roman Ingarden, but unlike most other kinds. Lewis's position as a theorist is too reader-focused for New Criticism but also more formalistic than most reader-response theories. Nevertheless, these are the two movements with which his work has most in common, unlike other major twentieth-century movements, such as gender studies, Marxist theory, new historicism, queer theory, postmodernism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism.