New book on C.S. Lewis and the Inklings

In the interests of catching up from my long absence from blogging, I’d like to start with a book announcement. Long-time readers might recall the publication of a collection of essays that emerged from C.S. Lewis & Inklings Society conferences. That collection, to which I contributed a chapter, was Truths Breathed Through Silver: The Inklings’ Moral and Mythopoeic Legacy, edited by Jonathan Himes with Joe R. Christopher and Salwa Khoddam (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.) Well, the time has come for a follow-up collection, and this time around, I am not only a contributor but an assistant-editor. It’s still fairly early, so I do not have a release date or a cover image to share, but I can give you the table of contents (below).

Having heard most of these essays delivered at the conference in 2010, and having now read and assisted with the editing of them in print, I can say this is a very good group of essays. Ward’s and Glyer’s are especially strong, as one would expect, and there are several very stimulating essays on less familiar topics and comparisons (e.g., Hall, Moore, Neuhouser, Adkison). Stockton’s essay on the libraries in Narnia wonderfully parallels David Oberhelman’s on the libraries of Middle-earth from the first CSLIS collection. Also, several of the essays were award-winners at the conference (Moore, Wright, my own). The collection leans more heavily toward Lewis than the other Inklings (and para-Inklings), but this is consistent with the mission of the Society. It compliments rather nicely the Mythopoeic Society’s heavier emphasis on Tolkien.

More news as it develops!

C.S. Lewis and the Inklings: Discovering Hidden Truth
Edited by Salwa Khoddam and Mark R. Hall with Jason Fisher

Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction / Salwa Khoddam and Mark R. Hall

PART I: HIDDENNESS, DIVINE AND LITERARY

• “Looking Along the Beam”: Divine Hiddenness in C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / Michael Ward

PART II: RELATIONSHIPS: COLLABORATION AND COMPANIONSHIP

• Lewis in Disguise: Portraits of Jack in the Fiction of His Friends / Diana Pavlac Glyer
• Louisa MacDonald: George’s Tower of Strength / David L. Neuhouser
• The Motif of Discovery in The Chronicles of Narnia / Janice Prewitt

PART III: LITERARY CRAFT: POEIMA: GENRES, LINGUISTICS, AND ARCHITECTONICS

• Blood and Thunder: Penny Dreadfuls and the Novels of G.K. Chesterton / J. Cameron Moore
• The Planetary Architectonics of the Ransom Trilogy / Seth Wright
• Dwarves, Spiders, and Murky Woods: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Wonderful Web of Words / Jason Fisher
• Music in World Making: The Creation of the World, Middle-earth, and Narnia / Norman Styers

PART IV: PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES: AETHETICS AND ETHICS

• A Tryst with the Romantics: Wordsworth, Keats, and C.S. Lewis on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth / Donald T. Williams
• “Likeness” and “Approach”: Mikhael Bakhtin, C.S. Lewis, and the Liturgical Consummation of Literary Genre / Aaron Taylor
• Encounters of a Different Kind: Wittgenstein-Popper and Lewis-Anscombe / Danny M. Adkison

PART V: LITERARY INFLUENCES: MYTHS AND BOOKS

• The Libraries of Narnia / James Stockton
• The Journeys to and from Purgatory Island: A Dantean Allusion at the End of C.S. Lewis’s “The Nameless Isle” / Joe R. Christopher
• The Book of Revelation, Ragnarök, and the Narnian Apocalypse in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle / Salwa Khoddam
• Reframing Time and Space: Narrative as a Vehicle of Travel, Tragedy, and Transcendence in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra / Mark R. Hall

Afterword / Salwa Khoddam