Canto Classics
8 total works
This volume includes over twenty of C. S. Lewis's most important literary essays, written between 1932 and 1962. The topics discussed range from Chaucer to Kipling, from 'The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version' to 'Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism', from Shakespeare and Bunyan to Sir Walter Scott and William Morris. Common to each essay, however, is the lively wit, the distinctive forthrightness and the discreet erudition which characterizes Lewis's best critical writing.
Love is the commonest these of serious imaginative literature and is still generally regarded as anble and ennbling passion. Love has not always taken such precedence, however, and it was in fact not until the eleventh century that French poets first began to express the romantic species of passion which English peots were still writing about in the nineteenth century. This book is intended for students of medieval literature from A-level upwards. Anyone interested in the `Courtly Love' tradition. Fans of C.S. Lewis's writings.
This entertaining and learned volume contains book reviews, lectures, and hard to find articles from the late C. S. Lewis, whose constant aim was to show the twentieth century reader how to read and how to understand old books and manuscripts.
Professor Lewis believed that literature exists above all for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He doubted the use of strictly evaluative criticism, especially its condemnations. Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books, and 'bad taste' is thought of as a taste for bad books. Professor Lewis's experiment consists in reversing the process, and judging literature itself by the way men read it. He defined a good book as one which can be read in a certain way, a bad book as one which can only be read in another. He was therefore mainly preoccupied with the notion of good reading: and he showed that this, in its surrender to the work on which it is engaged, has something in common with love, with moral action, and with intellectual achievement. In good reading we should be concerned less in altering our own opinions than in entering fully into the opinions of others; 'in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself'. As with all that Professor Lewis wrote, the arguments are stimulating and the examples apt.
This selection from the writings of C. S. Lewis gathers together forty book reviews, never before reprinted, as well as four major essays which have been unavailable for many decades. A fifth essay, 'Image and Imagination', is published for the first time. Taken together, the collection presents some of Lewis's finest literary criticism and religious exposition. The essays and reviews substantiate his reputation as an eloquent and authoritative critic across a wide range of literature, and as a keen judge of contemporary scholarship, while his reviews of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will be of additional interest to scholars and students of fantasy.
Language - in its communicative and playful functions, its literary formations and its shifting meanings - is a perennially fascinating topic. C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words explores this fascination by taking a series of words and teasing out their connotations using examples from a vast range of English literature, recovering lost meanings and analysing their functions. It doubles as an absorbing and entertaining study of verbal communication, its pleasures and problems. The issues revealed are essential to all who read and communicate thoughtfully, and are handled here by a masterful exponent and analyst of the English language.
C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, as historical and cultural background to the literature of the middle ages and renaissance. It describes the 'image' discarded by later ages as 'the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organisation of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe'. This, Lewis's last book, was hailed as 'the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind'.
This 1967 book was compiled by Alastair Fowler from notes left by C. S. Lewis at his death. It is Lewis longest piece of literary criticism, as distinct from literary history. It approaches The Faerie Queene as a majestic pageant of the universe and nature, celebrating God as 'the glad creator', and argues that conventional views of epic and allegory must be modified if the poem is to be fully enjoyed and understood.