Lewis and the Mechanisms of Mass Culture
Lewis remained a figure of significance in the decades after his death despite dramatic social change in the second half of the twentieth century. The reasons for this continued visibility involve circumstances particular to Lewis and larger social changes, especially in communications and media technologies, education, and culture. Innovation in communications media—radio, the paperback, television, and film—meant that incrementally greater numbers of people became familiar with the name of C. S. Lewis. Dramatic expansions in education also contributed to the canonization of his books. This period also saw a bifurcation in Lewis’s platform between the more commercially successful author of the Narnia books and the Christian apologist intensely admired in America. Lewis’s enduring visibility is to be credited to a myriad of circumstances particular to him and to the profound social changes affecting the religious, cultural, and intellectual life of twentieth-century Britain and America.