Cheap C.S. Lewis eBooks

C.S. Lewis

Most people know C.S. Lewis through his fiction—the The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, or the Ransom trilogy—or through his apologetical writings, like Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain. Yet in the academic community, Lewis is best remembered for his literacy criticism and expertise in medieval English literature. In fact, he contributed a seminal volume titled “English Literature in the 16th Century, Excluding Drama” to the famed Oxford History of English Literature, which Lewis affectionately shortened to “OHEL.”

If you haven’t sampled Lewis’ literary writings, I have some good news. For a limited time, HarperCollins is offering some of his best but underrated essay collections for just $3.99. They include:
 
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It describes the “image” discarded by later years as “the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe.” This, Lewis’s last book, has been hailed as “the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind.”

Image and Imagination
Image and Imagination presents some of C.S. Lewis’s finest literary criticism and religious exposition. This selection gathers together forty book reviews—never before reprinted—as well as four major essays which have been unavailable for many decades, and a fifth essay, “Image and Imagination,” published for the first time. The essays and reviews substantiate Lewis’s 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.

An Experiment in Criticism
Why do we read literature and how do we judge it? C. S. Lewis’s classic An Experiment in Criticism springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He argues that “good reading,” like moral action or religious experience, involves surrender to the work in hand and a process of entering fully into the opinions of others: “in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.” Crucial to his notion of judging literature is a commitment to laying aside expectations and values extraneous to the work, in order to approach it with an open mind. Amid the complex welter of current critical theories, C. S. Lewis’s wisdom is valuably down-to-earth, refreshing and stimulating in the questions it raises about the experience of reading.

Studies in Words
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 analyzing 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.

The Allegory of Love
The Allegory of Love is a study in medieval tradition—the rise of both the sentiment called “Courtly Love” and of the allegorical method—from eleventh-century Languedoc through sixteenth-century England. C. S. Lewis devotes considerable attention to The Romance of the Rose and The Faerie Queene, and to such poets as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Usk.

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
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 understand old books and manuscripts. Highlighting works by Spenser, Dante, Malory, Tasso, and Milton, Lewis provides a refreshing update to medieval and Renaissance criticism, and equips modern readers to understand these works in a new way.

Selected Literary Essays
Selected Literary Essays includes over twenty of C. S. Lewis’s most important literary essays, written between 1932 and 1962. The topics discussed in this volume range from Chaucer to Kipling, from “The literary impact of the authorized version” to “Psycho-analysis and literary criticism,” to Shakespeare and Bunyan, and Sir Walter Scott and William Morris. Common to each essay, however, are the lively wit, the distinctive forthrightness, and the discreet erudition which characterize Lewis’s best critical writing.