The Text World In C.S.lewis’ The Lion,the Witch And The Wardrobe

The Irish-born British writer Clive Staples Lewis(1898-1963)is not only a literary critic with unique insights and a loyal Christian missionary,but also a popular children’s writer.His The Lion,the Witch and the Wardrobe is a world-famous children’s literature,which is deeply affected by the public.However,the academic researches and explorations on it are still in a state of youth.Most of the domestic researches pay more attentions to its religious connotation.Meanwhile,the foreign studies have a wider research range,which mainly analyze the novel’s connotations and its artistic techniques from classic theoretical perspectives.This thesis aims to,from the perspective of the text world theory of the cognitive poetics,through probing into the text world construction,the constructed style of the text,and readers’ emotional experience in their reading process,articulate Lewis’ artistic techniques in this creation and the novel’s cognitive characteristics.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces C.S.Lewis’ life,the background and storyline of The Lion,the Witch,and the Wardrobe,a literature review of relevant researches at home and abroad,the text world theory’s core concepts,and several research significances.Chapter Two focuses on the construction of the text-drivenness power in the discourse world.The novel not only uses static and dynamic scenarios’ text-drivenness power to activate readers’ associations,building an abundant discourse world to enhance readers’ reading immersion;it also uses rich narrative methods to assume the significant text-drivenness function of activating readers’ daily experience,which can provide child readers a concise approach to experience the discourse.Chapter Three emphasizes the abundant world-building elements in the novel’s text world.By mobilizing various world-building elements,such as the vivid colors,the blended sounds,and the magical space-crossing travel passage—the wardrobe,the novel guides readers to construct a tridimensional text world to enrich their reading cognitive experience.Chapter Four mainly analyzes the colorful text style of the novel by analyzing the connotation of the modal world.The psychic animal characters and the mysterious magics created in the story endow the text with an anthropomorphic and fantastic style;the strong will and firm belief shown by the protagonists’ modality form a confirmed and convinced text style;and the precise description of the war scenes and class system,as well as the protagonists’ disgust and sentiment reflected in the modal world together,present a traumatic style against war and class in the novel.Chapter Five concentrates on child readers’ cognitive and emotional experience.Readers can produce the emotional experience of self-identification by choosing good and evil with young protagonists;they can have empathy from Edmund’s spite and guilt;they can also have sympathy by going through protagonists’ experience of making friends with different characters.Chapter Six summarizes each chapter’s findings,such as the cognitive characteristics of the text,and the artistic techniques used in its creation process,and reflects on this thesis’ s limitations.The text world theory provides a creative method for the study of children’s literature,allowing scholars to discover the cognitive features in The Lion,the Witch,and the Wardrobe which are highly child care,and to appreciate Lewis’ narrative techniques,which leads literati to put child readers in a central stage in the process of creating children’s literature.