Word and Story in C.S. Lewis

by Peter Schakel (Editor), Charles A. Huttar (Editor)

Hardcover, no dust jacket. Ex-Library. Otherwise VG

330 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1991

Reviews

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

An anthology of perceptive essays edited by Peter Schakel. In terms of content, I think this is very good scholarship, while not necessarily ground-breaking. Some perceptive comments on myth, allegory, and the classic understanding of romance. Most scholars focused primarily on The Space Trilogy

I don't know many of the names in here, as they seem to be from a past generation of Lewis scholars. Charles A. Huttar's name sticks out to me. There's Gregory Wolfe who founded the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society. There's Colin Manlove who did C. S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement. And Mara E. Donaldson who did Holy Places Are Dark Places: C. S. Lewis And Paul Ricœur On Narrative Transformation. The afterword is written by Owen Barfield.

Schakel himself is well known, having written Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces and The Way into Narnia: A Reader's Guide and Is Your Lord Large Enough?: How C. S. Lewis Expands Our View of God.

First published in 1991 by University of Missouri Press, who in the past seems to have done a small run of books on Lewis studies. Then it seems this book was taken up and republished with a new cover by Wipf & Stock in a later edition.

Footnoted by McGrath as a work on myth in Lewis.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction—Peter J. Schakel

I. Language
C. S. Lewis and the Making of Metaphor—Lyle H. Smith, Jr.
C. S. Lewis as a Student of Words—Michael A. Covington
The Sound of Silence: Language and Experience in Out of the Silent Planet—Verlyn Flieger
Essential Speech: Language and Myth in the Ransom Trilogy—Gregory Wolfe
Sanctifying the Literal: Images and Incarnation in Miracles—Thomas Werge
A Lifelong Love Affair with Language: C. S. Lewis's Poetry—Charles A. Huttar
Language and Self-Consciousness: The Making and Breaking of C. S. Lewis's Personae—Stephen Medcalf

II. Narrative
Theology in Stories: C. S. Lewis and the Narrative Quality of Experience—Gilbert Meilaender
Orual's Story and the Art of Retelling: A Study of Till We Have Faces—Mara E. Donaldson
Bent Language in Perelandra: The Storyteller's Temptation—Donald E. Glover
C. S. Lewis and the Tradition of Visionary Romance—John D. Haigh
Myth or Allegory? Archetype and Transcendence in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis—Paul Piehler
C. S. Lewis's Ransom Stories and Their Eighteenth-Century Ancestry—Jared C. Lobdell
The Multiple Worlds of the Narnia Stories—Michael Murrin
"Caught Up into the Larger Pattern": Images and Narrative Structures in C. S. Lewis's Fiction—Colin Manlove
Perelandra Revisited in the Light of Modern Allegorical Theory—Marius Buning

Afterword—Owen Barfield
Contributors
Permissions
Index

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fine book by Schakel.