Lupiverse(es)

David Stockhoff · 16 Mar 2012, 13:09 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2012 09:09:51 -0400
Subject: (urth) Lupiverse(es)
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I'm not sure which of MacDonald's books I consider stilted and boring, 
although I encountered those as an adult. But I loved the Curdie books 
my mom read to me when I was four or five.

On 3/15/2012 10:51 PM, Craig Brewer wrote:
> Phantastes was a beautiful book! Never besmirch the name of MacDonald! 
> heh heh...
>
> As someone who was raised in a relatively a-religious family, I 
> usually just ignored the obviously religious bits of 
> Lewis/Tolkien/whoever else. But as I got older, I found that the 
> non-"preachy" manner of fictional Christian works actually worked to 
> explain why faith was interesting and attractive. After all, here was 
> some fantasy that might be real on a certain level, or at least a 
> number of people thought so.
>
> That's a perspective I've had trouble explaining to friends who had 
> that "betrayal" reaction to Narnia.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> *To:* The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> *Sent:* Thursday, March 15, 2012 9:42 PM
> *Subject:* Re: (urth) Lupiverse(es)
>
> On 3/15/2012 10:32 PM, Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote:
> > Wasn't MacDonald a good half century older? And he was one of those 
> mollified Presbyterians.
> > But is it fair to criticise didacticism which didn't pretend to be 
> anything else? I mean, neither MacDonald nor Lewis, that I know of, 
> tried to present their books as doctrinally free. At least MacDonald 
> was overt as to their didactic nature. It isn't Lewis's fault if the 
> Narnia books got popular that they were pushed everywhere as mere 
> children's books without a caveat that they were had a religious 
> undercurrent. Maybe the real issue is that they are popular because 
> that undercurrent pleases people, just as Praise of Empire pleased 
> others, and those who take exception to that way of writing resent the 
> popularity.
>
> Well, if it's boring, it's boring. And it depends on what you mean by 
> "didn't pretend"---as with Lewis, most of his readers were children. 
> If you have no idea what you might be reading, you can't know whether 
> it's pretense or not.
>
> Certainly Lewis wasn't responsible for whatever marketing got his 
> books in my local library and into my hands. But I doubt they were and 
> are popular because they are religious: rather, they probably are 
> popular because they are accessible, imaginative (sometimes magical, 
> as you said), action-packed, well-written, comforting (Aslan always 
> appeared to set things right), and morally nonthreatening. Girls read 
> them as much as boys did, and no parents objected to them.
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