Dr. Bruce L. Edwards
Professor of English
Associate Dean for
Born in
Belfast, Northern Ireland on November 29, 1898, Clive Staples
("Jack") Lewis was reared in a peculiarly bookish home, one in which
the reality he found on the pages of the books within his parents' extensive
library seemed as tangible and meaningful to him as anything that transpired
outside their doors. As adolescents, Lewis and his older brother, Warren, were
more at home in the world of ideas and books of the past, than with the
material, technological world of the 20th Century. When the tranquillity and
sanctity of the Lewis home was shattered beyond repair by the death of his
mother when he was ten, Lewis sought refuge in composing stories and excelling
in scholastics. Soon thereafter he became precociously oriented toward the
metaphysical and ultimate questions.
The
rest of his saga and the particulars of his writing career might be seen as the
melancholy search for the security he had took granted during the peace and
grace of his childhood. By Lewis's testimony, this recovery was to be had only
in the "joy" he discovered in an adult conversion to Christianity.
Long-time friend and literary executor of the Lewis estate, Owen Barfield has
suggested that there were, in fact, three "C. S. Lewises."
That is to say, during his lifetime Lewis fulfilled three very different
vocations-- and fulfilled them successfully. There was, first, Lewis the
distinguished Oxbridge literary scholar and critic; second, Lewis, the highly
acclaimed author of science fiction and children's literature; and thirdly,
Lewis, the popular writer and broadcaster of Christian apologetics. The amazing
thing, Barfield notes, is that those who may have known of Lewis in any single
role may not have known that he performed in the other two. In a varied and
comprehensive writing career, Lewis carved out a sterling reputation as a scholar,
a novelist, and a theologian for three very different audiences.
No
brief summary can thus do justice to the many and varied works Lewis produced
in his lifetime between 1919-1961. Indeed, more Lewis
volumes--collection of essays, chiefly--have appeared after his death than
during his lifetime. A sampling of the range and depth of his achievements in
criticism, fiction, and apologetics might begin, however, with the first books
Lewis published, two volumes of poetry: Spirits in Bondage, published in
1919 when Lewis was but 23, and his long narrative poem, Dymer,
published in 1926. Neither were critical successes, convincing the classically
trained Lewis that he would never become an accomplished poet given the rise of
modernism; subsequently he turned his attention to literary history,
specifically the field of medieval and renaissance literature. Along the way,
however, Lewis embraced Christianity, and in 1933, published his first
theological work, The Pilgrim's Regress, a parody of John Bunyan's The
Pilgrim's Progress, that details Lewis's flight from skepticism
to faith in a lively allegory.
In
1936, Lewis published the breakthrough work that earned him his reputation as a
scholar, The Allegory of Love, a work of high-calibre, original
scholarship that revolutionized literary understanding of the function of
allegory in medieval literature, particularly Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Between 1939 and 1954, Lewis continued to
publish well-received works in criticism and theory, debating E. M. W. Tillyard on the objectivity of poetry in The Personal
Heresy, published in 1939, and in that same year publishing a collection of
essays under the title Rehabilitations--a work whose title characterized
much of Lewis's work, as he attempted to bring the fading critical reputation
of authors he revered back into balance. In 1942, his A Preface to Paradise
Lost attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of John Milton, while in 1954, he offered a comprehensive overview of 16th-century
British poetry and narrative in his English Literature in the Sixteenth
Century.
Lewis
is best known, however, for his fiction and his Christian apologetics, two
disciplines complementary to each other within his oeuvre. In 1936, Lewis
completed the first book in a science-fiction space trilogy, Out of the
Silent Planet, that
introduced the hero, Edwin Ransom, a philologist modeled
roughly on Lewis's friend, J. R. R. Tolkien. Perelandra, a new version of Paradise Lost
set in Venus, followed in 1943, and That Hideous Strength completed the
trilogy in 1945; the latter Lewis billed as "a fairy tale for
adults," treating novelistically of the themes
Lewis had developed in his critique of modern education in The Abolition of
Man, published two years earlier. Lewis's most notable critical and
commercial success, however, is certainly his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, which he published in single volumes from
1950-56. These popular children's fantasies began with the 1950 volume, The
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a tale centered
around Aslan the lion, a
Christ-figure who creates and rules the supernatural
Lewis's
reputation as a winsome, articulate proponent of Christianity began with the
publication of two important theological works: The Problem of Pain, a defense of pain--and the doctrine of hell-- as evidence of
an ordered universe, published in 1940; and The Screwtape
Letters, a "interception" of a senior devil's correspondence with
a junior devil fighting with "the Enemy," Christ, over the soul of an
unsuspecting believer, published in 1942. Lewis emerged during the war years as
a religious broadcaster who became famous as "the apostle to skeptics," in
A
prolific and popular author, Lewis's criticism, fiction, and religious essays
stay in print, and are continually reprinted in various bindings and new
collections. Lewis's life and work have been also the focus of countless books
since his death in 1963. Ironically, though, Lewis may eventually suffer the
same fate as other authors he himself "rehabilitated" during his
scholarly career. Surfeited by volume after volume of analysis, paraphrase, and
critique, Lewis's own canon may be dwarfed by secondary sources, an attitude he
opposed all of his life in reading others. As it stands, both his fiction and
theological writings have been endlessly and hyper-critically explored,
creating a trail of footnotes and asides long enough to camouflage the
essential viewpoints and facts about his life--thus discouraging even the most
diligent student of Lewis. It must be said that Lewis's own works remain the
most reliable source and insightful interpreter of this original thinker and
personality.
I.
Primary Works Written by C. S. Lewis
NOVELS:
Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra,
1942; That Hideous Strength, 1945; The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe, 1950; Prince Caspian, 1951; The Voyage of the
"Dawn Treader," 1952; The Silver
Chair, 1953; The Horse and His Boy, 1954; The Magician's Nephew,
1955; The Last Battle, 1956; Till We Have Faces, 1956.
THEOLOGY:
The Pilgrim's Regress, 1933; The Problem of Pain, 1940; The
Screwtape Letters, 1942; The Abolition of Man,
1943; The Great Divorce, 1945; Miracles, 1947; The Weight of
Glory, 1949; Mere Christianity, 1952; Reflections on the Psalms,
1958; The Four Loves, 1960; The World's Last Night, 1960; Letters
to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 1963; Of Other Worlds, 1966; Christian
Reflections, 1967; God in the Dock, 1971.
LITERARY
CRITICISM: The Allegory of Love, 1936; Rehabilitations,
1939; The Personal Heresy, 1939; A Preface to Paradise Lost,
1942; Arthurian Torso, 1948; English Literature in the Sixteenth
Century, 1954; Studies in Words, 1960; An Experiment in Criticism,
1961; The Discarded Image, 1964; Studies in Medieval and Renaissance
Literature, 1966; Spenser's Images of Life, 1967; Selected
Literary Essays, 1969; Present Concerns, 1986.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
Surprised by Joy, 1955; A Grief Observed, 1961.
CORRESPONDENCE:
Letters of C. S. Lewis, 1966; Letters to an American Lady,
1967; The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 1979.
POETRY:
Spirits in Bondage, 1919; Dymer, 1926; Poems,
1964; Narrative Poems, 1969.
Adapted from http://personal.bgsu.edu/~edwards/biobib.html
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés
López
© Gemma Verdú Trescolí
vertres@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València
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