Eight Children in Narnia: The Making of a Children’s Story

Eight Children in Narnia is a detailed study of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, exploring the story's influences, themes, symbols, ironies -- and the reasons for its enormous popular success. Lobdell draws attention to insistent motifs in the work: the great house in the country, the past alive in the present, the life of the imagination, the mixture of the familiar and the adventurously new, the combination of pageant and satire, the child as judge, and the child as warrior. A prolific writer and literary scholar with an established reputation, Lewis decided quite late in life to write something completely new to him: a story for children, and he drew upon his own childhood memories as well as his literary and philosophical theories. Among the many important influences Lobdell identifies Bunyan, Swift, Kipling, and the popular children's writer E. Nesbit, as well as the classic fairy-tale and medieval romance.

Jared Lobdell is an American writer and teacher of Literary Criticism (and many other fields). As such, he has published several articles about various fantasy and science-fiction writers, like C.S. Lewis and George Orwell. He is the author of The World of the Rings and The Rise of Tolkenian Fantasy. He lives in Harrisburg, PA.