Selected Literary Essays

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 Authorized 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.

Contents:

Preface by Walter Hooper

1. De Descriptione Temporum
2. The Alliterative Metre
3. What Chaucer really did to Il Filostrato
4. The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line
5. Hero and Leander
6. Variation in Shakespeare and Others
7. Hamlet: The Prince or The Poem?
8. Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century
9. The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version
10. The Vision of John Bunyan
11. Addison
12. Four-Letter Words
13. A Note on Jane Austen
14. Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot
15. Sir Walter Scott
16. William Morris
17. Kipling's World
18. Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare
19. High and Low Brows
20. Metre
21. Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism
22. The Anthropological Approach

Index