Keynote: Informing the Inklings: C.S. Lewis's Debt to George MacDonald

Cornwall Auditorium

Though the influence of MacDonald on Lewis is well-documented, Lewis’s own account cannot be correct as it stands. The interesting question, therefore, is why Phantastes came to occupy such a key role in Lewis’s retrospective description of his conversion. The answer, seen in terms of his most openly acknowledged use of MacDonald in The Great Divorce, seems to lie in the inseparability of Lewis’s idea of "holiness" and his expectations of fiction, with the creation of other, parallel worlds to our own.