From the Publisher
"Thoughtful and thought-provoking, these essays expertly help to situate the intellectual world of C.S. Lewis in its broader context. McGrath knows Lewis' corpus in detail and casts a friendly though not unquestioning eye over areas of his work which have hitherto received surprisingly little attention. He connects Lewis to currents and schools of thought that have a refreshing and enlarging effect upon our understanding of the man. The figure who emerges from this examination is a more interesting and important theological thinker that captured in any previous comparable study."—Michael Ward, Oxford University
“Alister McGrath’s The Intellectual World of C.S. Lewis is a very welcome addition to the growing number of scholarly studies of Lewis. Well-researched and written, this book offers fresh insights into several areas of Lewis’s literary corpus, including his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, his intellectual development as an Oxford student, and his ideas on myth and metaphor. McGrath also offers penetrating discussions of Lewis’s argument from desire, the role of reason and imagination in his apologetics, his religious identity as an Anglican, and his status as a ‘theologian’. I highly recommend The Intellectual World of C.S. Lewis as well as McGrath’s biography of Lewis, C.S. Lewis: A Life.”—Don King, Montreat College
“In the mass of recent writing about CS Lewis, this volume stands out as essential, and should be on everyone’s reading list, whether that of the research scholar or general reader. The author has the same feeling for the ‘great tradition’ of western literature and theology as Lewis himself did, and has similar skills in exploring it, so that Lewis is for the first time properly set in his intellectual context. It is appropriate to deploy the metaphors of light and vision that the author detects in Lewis, to affirm that this is a series of brilliant essays, brightly illuminating the intellectual resources on which Lewis draws, enabling us better to see the ‘big picture’ which connects myth, metaphor, memory, realism, religious desire, the Anglican mind, and the dynamics of academic power. In reviewing these themes, this exceptional study combines reason and imagination as Lewis did himself. Like Lewis’ own work, it is both deeply learned and accessible to a wide range of readers.”—Paul Fiddes, Oxford University
"This important new study of Lewis sets the man and his ideas in the intellectual world of his day, and so helps us to appreciate all the more fully his distinctive contribution as a scholar, an artist and an apologist. Through a series of finely researched and characteristically well-written essays, Alister McGrath both reveals the extent to which Lewis was a product of his own age, and reminds us why he remains every bit as relevant for ours. A penetrating engagement with one of the most important Christian voices of the twentieth century."—Trevor Hart, University of St Andrews
