Drawing on C. S. Lewis’s essays, sermons, and fiction, The Lion’s Country offers a comprehensive exploration of Lewis’s understanding of reality—important, Charlie W. Starr argues, to more fully understand Lewis’s writing but also to challenge and inform our own thought about what constitutes the Real.
A study of myth suggests that the stories we human beings tell ourselves about who we are make us who we are. Amber Lehning extends such discussion into the ecocritical realm, arguing that the stories we tell ourselves about our relationship to the natural world are at least as powerful as science or government policy as drivers of our behavior toward our planet. The destructive modern myths underlying today’s environmental crises create a kind of intellectual separation between humanity and its environment that can end up justifying the worst of environmental excesses—and perhaps, she argues, the only way to counter these negative humans-versus-nature stories is to shift some of the deep belief they command into new, positive, restorative stories.
Focusing on the themes of enchantment and loss in the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, this unique study incorporates elements of developmental psychology to explore both Tolkien’s life and art, deepening our understanding of the interrelationship between his biography and writing.
A Sense of Tales Untold examines the margins of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work: the frames, edges, allusions, and borders between story and un-story and the spaces between vast ages and miniscule time periods. The untold tales that are simply implied or referenced in the text are essential to Tolkien’s achievement in world-building, Peter Grybauskas argues, and counter the common but largely spurious image of Tolkien as a writer of bloated prose.
Through line-by-line annotations and accompanying commentary, this book weaves together the biographical, historical, and cultural threads of one of Hemingway’s more overlooked works, thus providing much needed guidance for Hemingway scholars and general readers alike.
The Shared Witness of C. S. Lewis and Austin Farrer explores a number of areas that demonstrate the ways in which Lewis and Farrer both intersected and influenced each other’s thought. Both insisted that myth prepared the heart for a sense of divine glory and even had a place in the Christian scriptures.
Sometimes characterized as the most significant author since Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway was an acknowledged master of the short story, with his groundbreaking style and its apparent simplicity and honesty changing the nature of English prose fiction. While in the early 1920s some mainstream editors seemed baffled by their subtlety, today his stories are mainstays in the classroom, taught at all levels from secondary school through university graduate courses.
Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” has secured a place among the greatest works in that genre—the story is widely considered Hemingway’s greatest. To explore the richness of this work, David L. Anderson returns to a somewhat unusual approach, that of archetypal criticism, which allows us to examine the story in more universal, rather than strictly historical, ways.
How can we convince readers, and especially students, to slow down to the crawl that is often necessary to see the real power in the compressed language Hemingway uses to tell a story? Are there qualities of digital age life that make students, somehow, more connected to Hemingway’s life and his writing? How can we compare the 21st-century “transhumanist” interest in making ourselves into “something more than merely human” with Hemingway’s characters like Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Catherine Barkley, Pilar, Robert Jordan, or Santiago, all of whom similarly wrestle within the bounds of their own mortality? Laura Godfrey has assembled a group of scholars who speak eloquently to these questions.
In this comprehensive guide, Lewis and Roos reveal how A Farewell to Arms represents a complex alchemy of Hemingway’s personal experience as a Red Cross ambulance driver in 1918, his extensive historical research of a time period and terrain with which he was personally unfamiliar, and the impact of his vast reading in the great works of 19th-century fiction. Ultimately, Lewis and Roos assert, Hemingway’s great novel is not simply a story of love and war, as most have concluded, but an intricate novel of ideas exploring the clash of reason and faith and deep questions of epistemology.
