Selected Literary Essays

  • Year 1969
  • Type Essay
  • Genre literary criticism
  • Tradition Anglican
  • Original language English

For For students of English literature from Chaucer to Kipling; the best single book of Lewis's shorter criticism.

Should I read this?

For the general reader
2 of 5 worth a look
For the researcher
5 of 5 essential
Difficulty
3 of 5 demanding

Twenty-two of Lewis's literary essays collected by Walter Hooper, from 'De Descriptione Temporum' and Chaucer to Donne, Bunyan, Jane Austen, Shelley, Scott, Morris and Kipling.

How it proceeds
  • Philosophic 3 of 5
  • Scriptural 1 of 5
  • Experiential 0 of 5
  • Sociological 2 of 5
  • Historical 4 of 5

Independent intensities, 0–5 — what the work is made of, not how good it is.

A posthumous collection of twenty-two literary essays, edited with a preface by Walter Hooper and published by Cambridge University Press in 1969. It opens with 'De Descriptione Temporum', Lewis's Cambridge inaugural lecture, and gathers essays from Rehabilitations (1939) and They Asked for a Paper (1962) together with pieces from journals and lectures. Among them are 'What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato', 'The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line', 'Hero and Leander', 'Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?', 'Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century', 'The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version', 'The Vision of John Bunyan', 'Addison', 'A Note on Jane Austen', 'Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot', 'Sir Walter Scott', 'William Morris', 'Kipling's World', 'Bluspels and Flalansferes', and essays on metre, psycho-analysis and the anthropological approach to literature.

Catalog IDW.07A25V.H

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