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The essential question that I wanted to explore was "How does children's literature shape the values and norms of children?" I wanted to explore the question with my specific work of focus being The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. It is widely known that the book was created to be a Christian allegory with many of Lewis's characters representing biblical hero's. The story also aims to teach children lessons that align with the religions views. I used this text to explore my essential question because C.S Lewis used his book to teach children about christianity and have the lessons they learn from the book stick with them throughout their lives. This essential question is an important one to explore because children are the future of society, and their development is incredibly important to the evolution of the world. Being an avid reader as a child, most of the lessons that stuck with me the most as I grew up came from books. Books like Winnie the Pooh taught me the importance of good friendships and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory taught me to always be respectful to others. Before exploring this essential question, these stories were all childhood memories to me, but as I dove deeper, I began to realize the impact that these stories had on me. The subliminal messages in the books shaped me and taught me important life lessons.

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Additional Text(Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)

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Additional Text(Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)

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S Lewis's classic of children's fantasy literature, to which six instalments of steeply declining interest and power were added, has now been brought to the screen by Andrew Adamson, of Shrek fame. The result is a triumph. It is gorgeous to look at, superbly cast, wittily directed and funny and exciting by turns. It unfolds the slim book into a rich visual experience that is bold and spectacular and sweeping, while retaining its human intimacies. I can't see how it could be done better. Perhaps Mel Gibson would have preferred Aslan to be whipped with barbed wire for 30 minutes before the main event, but Adamson handles it with finesse.

There will be many adults like me, who after loving the book as children went through a long post-adolescent phase of hysterically repudiating it after the Christian-humanist parable was explained. For me, it is a phase that this movie has definitively brought to an end. Adamson brings out the story's romantic gallantry and its wonderfully generous approach to childhood. For all the rhapsodic seriousness, and Blakean associations of England with Christianity, the film has a lightness of touch.

Simply by having human beings as characters, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is different from Tolkien and his heavy-footed myth - though, naturally, there is a connection, and Adamson sensibly builds on Peter Jackson's technical achievements in staging and narrative. What the director has done is bring it closer to the playful gravity of Lewis Carroll, and also the insouciant escapades of the young quartet in Enid Blyton's Adventure series.

As all the world knows, this is the story of four middle-class children in the second world war, whose father is away fighting the evil of Nazism. They are evacuated from Finchley, in London, to a country house, which is here increased to the size of a gigantic mansion, presided over by an apparently crotchety but actually very decent old boy, played (rather too fleetingly) by Jim Broadbent. The youngest of the children, Lucy - a scene-stealer of a performance from newcomer Georgie Henley - plays hide-and-seek with her boisterous siblings and leaps into a wardrobe, pushing through a dense mass of furs that become firs (as in a Freudian dream). She stumbles out into a snowy forest in the land of Narnia, in whose snowflake-swirl a gaslight dimly glows.

The place is under the spell of the evil White Witch, who has caused it to remain forever "winter without Christmas", until liberated by the four saviour-children under the command of the lion Aslan, a redeemer figure voiced by Liam Neeson. With the help of friendly beavers, spoken by Dawn French and Ray Winstone, and a droll, worldly fox (Rupert Everett), the children fearlessly embrace their destiny. The battles unfold like a richly coloured tapestry, with art direction inspired by the fluttering pennants and tented encampments of Olivier's Henry V.

Tilda Swinton plays the White Witch, and it is her finest hour. She has always been as much icon as actor, a kind of living, breathing installation - and therefore difficult to cast, especially in a modern setting. But her statuesque hauteur and that otherworldly presence are sublimely right here. Her white-fringed, padded-shoulder gown reminded me of the queenly Aquascutum outfit Mrs Thatcher wore in Paris on the fateful night of her leadership vote in 1990.

Swinton has a particularly good opening scene, in which the White Witch tempts young Edmund (Skandar Keynes) into betraying his friends with an insidious, addictive dollop of Turkish Delight. Keynes is very persuasive as the venally weak Edmund: a figure traditionally glossed as Judas, although there is something more recognisable and English about Edmund's failure. Later, the White Witch is to sneer at the captured faun Mr Tumnus (James McAvoy) that his fellow captive Edmund "turned you in for sweeties". That line reminded me, not entirely ironically, of Winston Smith and Syme in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and how wickedness and wretchedness can be found beneath the surface of English decency. The final sacrifice of Aslan is conveyed with absolute seriousness, yet never feels preachy.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a miraculously complete, digestible epic in itself, and I wonder if annual episodes of the succeeding six stories, in which Lewis boxed himself into an ever-narrowing theological corner, might be rather heavy weather - especially as the children will presumably need to be recast. This is more than good enough to be going on with. There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory. With this movie's buoyant fun, Adamson provides something akin to the sense of humour Graham Greene said he needed in order to believe. Although you don't need to believe in a fairytale to find it enchanting.

· Released next Thursday.

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The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

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S Lewis's classic of children's fantasy literature, to which six instalments of steeply declining interest and power were added, has now been brought to the screen by Andrew Adamson, of Shrek fame. The result is a triumph. It is gorgeous to look at, superbly cast, wittily directed and funny and exciting by turns.

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C. S. Lewis was an esteemed British writer in the 20th century. He is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but he is also noted for his other works of fiction. During his life, he held academic positions at both Oxford and Cambridge University. Lewis practiced Christianity and his faith was an important part of his work. The Chronicles of Narnia have sold millions of copies and the story had had movie, play, and many other adaptations.

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The Hidden Messages in Children's Stories

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The Hidden Messages in Children's Stories

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tal Breier Ben Moha: Equality time: the hidden messages in children's stories | Tal Breier Ben Moha | TEDxJaffaWomen

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Children love to hear stories and read books. But how much do we pay attention to the stories we choose for them and to the messages that hide between their pages? These implicit yet strong messages affect who our children will be as girls and boys, and later, as men and women.

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The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe helps answer my essential question in many ways. The Turkish delight in the story represents the dangers of gluttony and greed. While many of the children who read the story would act similarly to Edmund by eating the delicious sweet, C.S Lewis shows them the danger associated with greed to teach children to not let their vices get the best of them. At the end of the story, Edmund gets Knighted by Aslan, showing children that even after sinning, you can atone and be free of your sins. While the Narnia stories are some of the only famous pieces of literature that specifically aim to teach children values based on Christianity, books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Winnie the Pooh also aim to shape children and teach them lifelong values.

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The Enduring Impact Of Narnia On My Life

Katy Morgan | June 18th 2019

I still remember sitting on the blue chair in our living room at Christmas when I was six years old, tearing the wrapping paper off the largest, heaviest book I had ever held in my hands. The cover was golden brown and green and spread with a spidery map, adorned with little scenes in which girls and boys stood alongside winged horses and bearded dwarfs. From the top corner the dark face of a lion stared out at me.

I remember looking up at my mum and asking in amazement what this book was.

I had never heard of the Chronicles of Narnia before, but this treasury edition would become one of my most prized possessions. It is a beautiful book, with glossy pages and coloured borders and a gold ribbon to mark the page. And it turned out that the stories contained within it were equally beautiful.

Some books stay with us forever

There are a few significant books from my childhood which feel like part of me, because they formed my imagination and my love of language when I was very small. Both their words and their illustrations still live in my head. Of these books I think Narnia was the most significant. It wasn't just the language or the pictures or the plots (though I loved all of these). It was the symbolism. The stories are about Christ and the Christian life. They made me reflect on my own faith as I understood it.

Of course, I didn't catch all the symbolism when I was six. I realised early on that Aslan represented Jesus, but the rest came upon me gradually. I shouldn't think there were many years of my childhood when I didn't reread at least one of the Narnia stories. Even as a student, when I came home for Christmas or Easter, I would snuggle up with the old treasury edition, fiddle with the gold ribbon, and enjoy the familiar narratives and pictures.

A child's theology

C.S. Lewis' stories gave me a framework to ask questions about what I believed. As a child I wondered what heaven would be like, worrying that it would be one huge but very crowded room, or an eternal, exhausting school disco. But in The Last Battle, the heaven the characters find themselves in is a more vivid, more perfect, more "real" version of the Narnia they have always known, with all its mountains, trees and quiet places. "I have come home at last," says Jewel, the unicorn. Reading this, I began to hope for an eternity that was truly good. Sure enough, I later discovered that the Bible really does promise a new heaven and a new earth.

Other times I would experience things in my Christian life which I was able to make sense of because of the way C.S. Lewis had depicted them. I remember a period of rapid change and growth in my life. Feeling exhausted, I thought of Eustace's description of being painfully changed from a dragon back into a boy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. With sharp claws Aslan tears away the layers of dragon skin which represent Eustace's sin. "It hurt worse than anything I've ever felt", the boy explains. "The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off." I felt like that too-the pain and exhaustion of seeing more and more ways in which I didn't measure up to God, and the joy of knowing I was being made more like him. I still sometimes visualise the illustration of the weeping, despairing dragon, when I think about sin.

The Complete Chronicles of Narnia still sits in pride of place on my bookcase. Its gold ribbon is a little frayed now. I haven't read it in a few years. But it isn't hard to recognise the impact it has had on me. C.S. Lewis, along with his illustrator Pauline Baynes, created an imaginative and colourful world, with characters and images that stayed in my head. They wanted to convey truth in a beautiful and memorable way, and they helped me to understand God and explore my faith.

Other books have joined these stories now in my personal store of familiar images and words-the Bible not least among them. But I don't think anything will ever quite squeeze Narnia out.
This article is part of our Spark Wonder campaign. For many of us, a love of God's word was sparked in childhood as the Bible and Christian books were read to us. We can ignite the spark of wonder in a child's heart that will set them up for a lifetime of curiosity into all the things of God and His Word. Find out more here.

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The Enduring Impact Of Narnia On My Life

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I still remember sitting on the blue chair in our living room at Christmas when I was six years old, tearing the wrapping paper off the largest, heaviest book I had ever held in my hands. The cover was golden brown and green and spread with a spidery map, adorned ...

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In Pursuit of Truth | A Journal of Christian Scholarship

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Reading  with C. S. Lewis: this was my chosen approach when I co-authored a reader’s guide to Lewis’ classic story. Why was that a natural choice? The answer: Lewis bequeathed a richer legacy of literary criticism and theory that addresses his imaginative writing more than any other author I know. From Lewis’ nonfictional writing we can glean a large and detailed picture of how Lewis thinks we should read literature, and how we should not read it.

With the understood premise that I have garnered my data from C. S. Lewis himself, I propose to cover three topics: how not to read  how to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and how to read a children’s book as an adult reader.

How Not to Read

I need to be honest with you: my editor found this approach uninvitingly negative and excised it from my book. I think she was wrong to do so. We cannot read very long in Lewis’ criticism before we sense that Lewis was preoccupied with sparing his readers from wrong ways of reading. Just recall how much of An Experiment in Criticism is devoted to analyzing wrong ways of assimilating art and literature. Here are specimen chapter titles: “The Few and the Many,” “False Characterisations,” “How the Few and the Many Use Pictures and Music,” “The Reading of the Unliterary,” “On Misreading by the Literary.”

“The first thing to grasp about the sonnet sequence,” writes Lewis in his big book on sixteenth-century English literature, “is that it is not a way of telling a story” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama 327). Lewis devotes half of his famous essay on Hamlet to an analysis of how not to read the play, that is, by fixing attention on the characters instead of the play: “I confess myself a member of that school which has lately been withdrawing our attention form the characters to fix it on the plays” (“Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” 93).

Lewis believed that readers need to be cut off at the pass from incorrect ways of reading, and I therefore conclude that to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the spirit of Lewis’ own ways of reading literature, we must avoid the pitfalls that he himself delineates. Here is what Lewis thought about three common forms of misreading; and, as I elaborate them, you will doubtless recognize them as ways in which Christian readers commonly deal with the Narnian Chronicles.

Bad practice #1 is using The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe instead of receiving it. C. S. Lewis is against using a work of literature in the sense of immediately harnessing it to advance a reader’s agenda of interests or beliefs. This is not to imply that we do not make use of what we read. Rather it comments on an author’s right to be listened to before being judged, and also asserts a proper sequence by which we should go about assimilating a work of literature. In An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis states this principle: “We sit down before [a] picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way” (19).

The application of this principle to a reading of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is two-fold. For someone who is reading the story for the umpteenth time, Lewis’ directive is an encouragement to stare at the text carefully, deliberately looking for new effects, new meanings, new intricacies. For any Christian reader, moreover, Lewis’ axiom of receiving rather than using is a call to not be coercive or impatient regarding the religious meanings of the story. The religious meanings can be trusted to reveal themselves at the appropriate time, which, let me say, is a relatively late point in the story. Lewis’ formula is, “let the pictures tell you their own moral” (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children” 33).

Bad practice #2 is to value The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe primarily as a collection of ideas. Lewis saves some of his sternest warnings for this practice. He claims that to regard a work of literature “as primarily a vehicle for . . . philosophy is an outrage to the thing the poet has made for us” (An Experiment in Criticism 82). Furthermore, “one of the prime achievements in every good fiction has nothing to do with truth or philosophy . . . at all” (An Experiment in Criticism 83).

Now, let me anticipate a later point that I will make and say that Lewis would not wish us to think that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is devoid of religious ideas, nor that we should make something of them. The caution is that we should not reduce a work to its ideas, thereby suppressing other equally important aspects of it.

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Reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with C. S. Lewis

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Reading with C. S. Lewis: this was my chosen approach when I co-authored a reader’s guide to Lewis’ classic story. Why was that a natural choice? The answer: Lewis bequeathed a richer l…