Volume 6, number 2 (2016)

JIS logoVolume 6, number 2 (October 2016)

 
Click on an article for more information:

Kathryn Wehr, 'Dorothy L. Sayers’ Use of the Four Gospels in The Man Born to be King', pp. 3-24 (article) and 25-62 (table)
No abstract available.
Peter Gilliver, The First Inkling: Edward Tangye Lean, pp. 63-78
This article gathers together previously little-known information about Edward Tangye Lean, the undergraduate who founded the original Oxford literary society which gave its name to the later and more famous Inklings. Drawing on research into archival and published sources, it explores the literary and other activities of Lean during his time as an undergraduate at University College, and the ways in which he would have interacted with the two members of the later Inklings who are known to have had contact with him, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Jamie Hutchinson, 'Imagine That: A Barfieldian Reading of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces', pp. 79-112
On more than one occasion, Owen Barfield expressed his admiration for C.S. Lewis’s last novel, Till We Have Faces, singling it out as a work in which Lewis “really rises to the fullness of the mythopoeic imagination.” Barfield’s praise of the novel’s mythopoeia is understandable given his statements in Poetic Diction and The Rediscovery of Meaning concerning the literary artist and the creation of true myth. Lewis’s own account of his creative process (the changes he felt impelled to make to the myth of Cupid and Psyche) further validates the novel’s mythopoeic nature and identifies Lewis as a Barfieldian mythmaker. In addition, the novel appears to incorporate two of Barfield’s fundamental theories: the purposive evolution of human consciousness and the epistemic validity of the imagination. As is well known, Lewis found himself unable to accept either theory. I would argue, however, that “mythopoeic Lewis” inclined toward ideas that “rational Lewis” disavowed. Reading the novel with Barfield in mind suggests that it is both a fully realized instance of Lewis’s mythopoeic imagination and a work that dramatizes the necessary role of imagination in humanity’s ongoing spiritual development.

Mark Edwards, 'Till We Have Faces as Myth and Allegory', pp. 113-138
Till We Have Faces is widely regarded by admirers of C.S. Lewis as his best work of fiction, and also the most enigmatic. While it is not obviously didactic, most readers have a sense that a meaning lurks in it that cannot be ascertained by a conventional analysis of the plot, the observations of the narrator and her developing awareness of her own motives. It is argued here that Lewis, who was familiar with allegorical readings of the tale of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius and with at least some later imitations, may have been sufficiently influenced by these precedents to conceive his own tale as a partial allegory, in which Orual represents the fleshly or somatic element in humanity, sharing both in the labours of the soul and in its ultimate redemption.

Book Reviews
Marsha Daigle-Williamson, Reflecting the Eternal: Dante’s Divine Comedy in the Novels of C.S. Lewis. Reviewed by John Took   139-141

Gregory Bassham (ed.), C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con. Reviewed by Norbert Feinendegen   142-146

Devin Brown, A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C.S. Lewis. Reviewed by Jeff Tirrell   147-149

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. Reviewed by Simon Blaxland-de Lange   150-153

Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan (eds), Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien. Reviewed by Brooke Boriack 154-157

Contributors