The protagonist of Phantastes is a young man with the curious name of Anodos, a Greek word that can mean “upward.” The protagonist of Lilith is the scion of a family in possession of a strange library, in which hangs a portrait of his ancestor, one “Sir Upward.” Having appeared four decades later, Lilith is not exactly a sequel to Phantastes, but it is clearly intended to open out onto the same moral universe as the first book, and perhaps to involve the same family.
“I knew that I had crossed a great frontier,” Lewis famously wrote of his experience reading MacDonald’s much earlier book Phantastes, published in 1858 and often considered to be one of the first modern fantasy novels. Lilith.” The certain influence on Lewis in this suggestive genealogy was his beloved George MacDonald, whose novel Lilith first appeared in 1895 and was part of a nineteenth century vogue for the demoness.
Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we learn that the White Witch is a descendant of “Adam’s first wife.
0 kommentar(er)
