Product Description : The Loss and the Silence. Aspects of Modernism in the Works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Traditionally the Inklings CS Lewis JRR Tolkien and Charles Williams have been seen as separate from the literature of their time as innovative in an idiosyncratic way at best and as reactionary and in deliberate opposition to contemporary progressive writing at worst Recent years have seen a gradual change in this view but few studies to date have attempted to read Lewis Tolkien and Williams alongside their most famous contemporaries the literary modernists This monograph represents the first fulllength study to draw explicit and indepth comparisons between the Inklings and writers such as TS Eliot WB Yeats James Joyce and David Jones among others An examination of both thematic and structural concerns reveals a number of shared issues that go beyond mere responses to the cataclysmic events of the first half of the twentieth century Myth as theme and structuring device worldbuilding as an attempt to render the authors subjective reality objective and authoritative writing as an unsuccessful attempt to overcome the nightmare of history and language as both the paradoxical means of creation and the reason creation must fail these concerns and tensions are central to the works of both Inklings and modernists In establishing that the works of Lewis Tolkien and Williams contain aspects that can be termed modernist this study also hopes to show that certain aspects of modernism might very well be termed fantastic