This book is intended for students of English literature at `A' level and above; general readers interested in a complete history of literature from Middle English to the earlier twentieth century.
--This text refers to the
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About the Author
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was an Irish author and scholar of mixed Irish, English, and Welsh ancestry. Lewis is known for his work on medieval literature, Christian apologetics and fiction, especially the childrens series entitled The Chronicles of Narnia and his science fiction Space Trilogy.
--This text refers to the
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Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), known as Jack to his friends, was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably the most influential Christian writer of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. His major contributions in literary criticism, children's literature, fantasy literature, and popular theology brought him international renown and acclaim. Lewis and his good friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the The Lord of the Rings, were part of the Inklings, an informal writers' club that met at a local pub to discuss story ideas. Lewis's fascination with fairy tales, myths, and ancient legends, coupled with inspiration drawn from his childhood, led him to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one of the best-loved books of all time. Six further books followed to become the immensely popular The Chronicles of Narnia. The final title in the series, The Last Battle, won the Carnegie Medal, one of the highest marks of excellence in children's literature. His other distinguished and popular accomplishments include Out of the Silent Planet, The Four Loves, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity.
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48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Through Drab to Gold,
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This review is from: Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford History of English Literature Ser) (Hardcover)
Commissioned as a volume in "The Oxford History of English Literature", "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama", as it was originally titled, proved such tedium to write that Lewis took to referring to it by the acronym "OHEL". The sixteenth century ends as one of the great ages - arguably the greatest - of English literary genius, but it began dismally. Except in Scotland, where a vigorous Medieval tradition lived on, "authors seem to have forgotten the lessons which had been mastered in the Middle Ages and learned little in their stead. Their prose is clumsy, monotonous, garrulous; their verse either astonishingly tame and cold or, if it attempts to rise, the coarsest fustian. . . . Nothing is light, or tender, or fresh. All the authors write like elderly men."This period of "bludgeon-work" gave way to something almost worse, "the Drab Age" - "earnest, heavy-handed, commonplace", a time when England did not shine and the peripheral light of Scotland guttered out. The story would scarcely be worth telling, save for the happy ending, a true eucatastrophe: "Then, in the last quarter of the century, the unpredictable happens. With startling suddenness, we ascend. Fantasy, conceit, paradox, color, incantation return. Youth returns. The fine frenzies of ideal love and ideal war are readmitted. Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Hooker . . . display what is almost a new culture: that culture which was to last through most of the seventeenth century and enrich the very meanings of the words England and Aristocracy. Nothing in the earlier history of our period would have enabled the sharpest observer to foresee this transformation." Had the scope of his labors not been set by his commission, Lewis would doubtless have preferred to skip the clumsy and drab, to delve into the riches of the Age of Gold. Still, despite his preferences, he was an apt choice to mine the less precious veins. Unlike many of his academic colleagues, who then as now regarded literature as merely a "job", Lewis read avidly in the most obscure corners. Little though he admired the early and drab writers, he was familiar with their work and could tease out virtues as well as point to flaws. Three points about this history stand out as unexpected or significant. First is the fine opening chapter, "New Learning and New Ignorance", which contests the commonplace view that the medieval period was a vale of ignorance from which mankind was happily rescued by the Renaissance. That opinion is no longer prevalent in scholarly circles (where Lewis is now sometimes derided for expounding the conventional wisdom - much like accusing Shakespeare of writing in cliches!), but most general readers take it for granted. Lewis' presentation is one-sided, but it is a side that needs to be heard. Second, Lewis devotes considerable space to Scotland, a territory absent from most of our literature classes. Though the Scots dialect is not easy to parse, Douglas and Dunbar and Lyndsay and their ilk are worthy of acquaintance. Third - a slighter point than the preceding but interesting in its own right - there is Lewis' treatment of John Donne. As a young man, Lewis wrote a notorious essay on Donne, dispraising the quality of his love poetry and hinting that his vogue was due more to fashion than merit. For these heresies he became the stock villain of every introduction to Donne's work. The "OHEL" volume takes a different tack. Lewis' appreciation of the "Songs and Sonnets" is warm and perceptive, with a useful disquisition on how to catch the rhythm of Donne's eccentric versification. It was not only, apparently, in matters of faith that Lewis was capable of casting off his youthful skepticism. Within its genre - the comprehensive academic history - Lewis' effort is as good as a single mind and hand can produce. Similar tomes are nowadays parceled out chapter by chapter, gaining no doubt in narrow expertise but losing personality and perspective. Both are present in plenitude here.
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
C. S. Lewis's radical literary views make this a must have!,
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This review is from: Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford History of English Literature Ser) (Hardcover)
Tolkien, in a letter to George Sayer as recorded in his biography JACK: A LIFE OF C. S. LEWIS, says that this is "a great book, the only one of his [Lewis's] that gives me unalloyed pleasure." Coming from Tolkien, this is very high praise indeed. Originally published as ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY EXCLUDING DRAMA and for some inexplicable reason recently renamed, this book, Lewis's longest work, will not be found in the libraries of the causal C. S. Lewis fan for the simple fact that it is a textbook and is aimed not at the general reader but instead the academic world (even in those days there was that damned phenomena of `publish or perish!'). For those who are studying this material, however, will find the book a very remarkable one at that. As a previous reviewer noted, Lewis began referring to this text as "O Hell!" as the writing process became very tedious to him. This book was ten years in the writing, and by the time it was ended Lewis wanted to concentrate more on theology and Narnia than this "critical nonsense." The end sections of the book do not shore this weariness, however, so have no fear.Although books of this sort always, by necessity, impose artificial time lines on literature which, in the long run, do not have a lot to do with the true literary history. To study literature in the sixteenth century, one should not confine oneself to going behind or in front of the time line to get a fuller understanding of the significance of the text. However, this is not really a fault of Lewis and it is a very difficult error to correct for literary historians. However, Lewis pulls off this artificial time limit very well by clearly illustrating the many strenghts and the many weaknesses of this century's literature. Because it is for the student of literature, much of the more radical elements of this text will be lost without a general knowledge of the preconceptions the academic world has in regard to the literature in question. The opening chapter ("New Learning and New Ignorance") stands as one of Lewis's most famous academic writing because of the sheer implications and challenges set forth in the chapter. He debunks many of the fashionable scholarly trends, focusing on how much of what the scholars say is off base. Lewis argues that the during the sixteenth century much of the literature proved extremely dull, saying the authors wrote like "elderly men". Toward the close of the century, however, something radical began to take place. There was a renewal and an elevation in quality from drab to gold, as Lewis puts it. Most literary scholars and historians think the Renaissance is responsible for this, but Lewis says this theory has no truth, because the humanists who were responsible for the Renaissance were terrible scholars and brought death to the literature they presented, presenting the classics' virtues as ills and instead focused on the way the classics said what they said. The humanists focused on the language and left the literature itself alone. Everything else about the literature they hated. Lewis continually attacks the humanists, stating that "the new learning [that of the humanists] created the new ignorance." His belief that the Renaissance never occurred in England, and if it did it was of no literary importance, is as radical a literary belief as accepting the Book of Mormon to the Bible would be to a Christian. The rest of the book reads as a survey of the literature of the period. All major and quite a large number of minor authors are represented in this. As a textbook, this stands as fascinating reading, for Lewis constantly illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of whoever he is dealing with, and his numerous quotations from the texts dealt with show the true skill of selection to prove a point. All of the quotations give a further understanding in context of Lewis's prose. If all textbooks were written with such skill and wit, there would not be the incredible resentment (myself included) of the price tag on most college text books. Lewis's 1938 on Donne, published in SEVENTEENTH CENTURY STUDIES PUBLISHED IN SIR HERBERT GRIERSON has made him the heretic and central enemy of all Donne scholars and fans. Here he does not attack him but helps readers deal with Donne's metre. However, Lewis only gives five pages to Donne, and he was fond of saying that "Donne's place is that of a minor poet." The reception of this book was fair, although the most resentment came from the academic circle. People accused Lewis of, as Sayer says in his biography, grossly oversimplifying by presenting only two classifications: drab and gold. Yvor Winters goes to the extreme when she says that "Mr. Lewis has simply not discovered what poetry is." Of all the volumes in the series this still sells the most. Sayer notes in the aforementioned biography that "many Oxford tutors still warn their students that it is `unsound but brilliantly written.' Nevertheless, or perhaps partly because of this warning, it outsells all the other volumes in this series." While it does not enjoy the monumental place in criticism of THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE, which many would argue is Lewis's most significant piece of criticism, partly because of the radical ideas mentioned above, this work stands as one of the most brilliant and enjoyable survey books every written.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ian Myles Slater on: Changes of Title, Varying Contents.,
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This review is from: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama (Oxford History of English Literature Series)
C.S. Lewis's "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)," first published in 1954, was part of a multi-volume series, The Oxford History of English Literature, and perhaps its most distinguished contribution (but see below). It also doubled as an installment in the Clark Lectures series (for 1944), which contributes an additional subtitle in some listings.
For reasons not immediately apparent, Oxford University Press has reissued this book in a "New Version" as "Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century." As the same fate has overtaken E. K. Chambers on "English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages," probably the other outstanding book in the series, which is now called "Malory and Fifteenth-Century Drama, Lyrics, and Ballads," there seems to have been a policy of titular refurbishing of at least some of the volumes in the series (once known, in an unfortunate acronym, as the O.H.E.L.). The current titles are accurate enough, although "Poetry and Prose" should have included a warning that Elizabethan drama was covered in a different volume. (Due to the facts of human biology, Lewis' book not unexpectedly covers a slightly longer period than either title indicates.) Still, the changes can cause confusion for anyone not aware of them; given the current prices, this may be more than a little annoying to some people. If you have one version, you probably don't need the other! Lewis on the "Sixteenth Century" was the product of enormous labor, including actually reading a huge body of writing generally ignored in literary histories, or customarily treated without much firsthand knowledge. Acquaintances -- not all of them friends, or even especially sympathetic -- described Lewis spending his days doggedly reading sermons and polemics, minor poets and bad poets, over the course of years. (He came to refer to the effort by the "infernal" acronym for the series noted above.) The result is a treasury of first-hand information, and with it Lewis' often-witty summations. It is engaging reading, even for those who disagree with Lewis -- and he seemingly set out to overturn most critical orthodoxies established between about 1900 and 1950, as well as a few older ones. For example, he treats Elizabethan literature as an extension of medieval culture. Humanism, in its period sense of concern for a classicizing Latin style, and the disparaging of the immediate past, is treated as an often-harmful interruption. This reverses a judgment that actually goes back to the period -- but a judgment originally made by self-styled Humanists themselves, of course. And he includes the literature of Lowland Scotland, often ignored, or treated as something apart. "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century" also appeared as an Oxford paperback under the original title (1973), unfortunately without the bibliographic supplement in which Lewis discussed textual histories and modern editions, if any, of both the well-known and the more obscure English and Scots literature of the late fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries. This portion is, of course, half a century out of date, but Lewis' observations are still of value. Even without this section, the paperback is worthwhile, and may be a good, reasonably-priced, alternative, but anyone familiar with the original form may be disappointed. Those interested in Lewis as a Christian apologist will find here his considered reflections on many of his predecessors, not all of them flattering, but his comments on doctrine are pretty strictly limited to explaining the issues debated. It may seem odd to see the Reformation through the lense of literary history, but Lewis avoids open advocacy, unlike his "Preface to 'Paradise Lost,'" in which (it seems to me) his concern that readers take Milton seriously tends to blend with a concern that they take seriously their own salvation. Lewis was also a poet, novelist, and occasional short-story writer. Here he occasionally briefly retells a story, with his usual skill, but, except for some overlapping topics, connections to his own fiction are less obvious than in some of his writings on the Middle Ages. There is a section on the Scots poet Sir David Lyndsay (d. 1555), who provided the epigraph to Lewis' novel "That Hideous Strength" (1946). And, somewhere it includes, as others have noted also, a quotation with the words "Stygian puddle glum." They undoubtedly lurks somewhere behind both the Marshwiggle named Puddleglum and the visit to the Narnian Underlands in "The Silver Chair" (1953, written 1950), although Dante, Virgil (of course), and a host of others, are under contribution there as well. I was under the impression, from my first reading of the book decades ago, that it was given as a quotation from Gavin Douglas' Scots translation of "The Aeneid" (1513; Lewis describes it with enthusiasm); but I have never been able to locate it in the appropriate section. A recent search of my old copy of the shorter paperback has revealed that it was indeed quoted from a translation, but as an example of bad one, and English, not Scots; of the dramas of Seneca, not Virgil. On page 256 (where I had marked it thirty years ago), "Tacitae Stygis" in "Hippolytus" (line 625), rather weakly rendered by the utterly obscure John Studley ("which cannot now be read without a smile"). Perhaps establishing just how much Lewis read, and with what close attention, no matter how dreary. (Reposted from my "anonymous" review of September 10, 2003)
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