"A gloriously profound engagement with C.S. Lewis. David Clare has researched meticulously and written a deeply nuanced and insightful book, scholarly, heartening and humane, illuminating of the man and of his work, and restoring him to the fullness of his Irishness in all its complexity."
- Lucy Caldwell, award-winning, Belfast-born author
"In this uniquely sophisticated study, Clare shows the centrality of Ireland to C.S. Lewis's thought and writing while refusing monolithic conceptions of national identity: Ireland was for Lewis a topological and linguistic mosaic whose lineaments his writing endlessly redrew and reconfigured. This book breaks new ground by examining Lewis's afterlives on stage and screen and by tracing a thread of religious transcendence which Lewis shares with fellow Northern visionaries like Van Morrison, Stewart Parker, and Christina Reid. Tolerant of difference and opposed to all forms of jingoism and colonialism, the figure that emerges from this important and nuanced study is a salutary one for our times."
- Dr.James Ward, University of Ulster-Coleraine
Even after he achieved world-wide fame through books such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Screwtape Letters, the Belfast-born author C.S. Lewis - often regarded as uncomplicatedly English by critics and the general public - proudly and regularly described himself as Irish. What's more, he frequently incorporated Irish elements into his work. This includes, for example, numerous allusions to Irish mythology, the repeated employment of Hiberno-English and Ulster Scots words and expressions, and a preference for tropes frequently found in Irish (and sometimes specifically Ulster Protestant) writing.
David Clare is Lecturer in Drama and English at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. His previous books include the monographs Bernard Shaw's Irish Outlook (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Irish Anglican Literature and Drama: Hybridity and Discord (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and the edited collections The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft (2018), The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716-2016 (2 vols., 2021), and Across Borders and Time: Jonathan Swift (2022).
