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Readers who meet Lewis first through the Narnian chronicles or Mere Christianity might never suspect that he is recognized in English-speaking countries as one of the greatest literary historians and critics of this century. His first major work of scholarship, The Allegory of Love, was acclaimed by a scholarly reviewer in a national newspaper (as quoted on the dust jacket): “Out of the multitude of volumes on literary criticism there arises once or twice in a generation a truly great work. Such, I believe, is this study by Mr. C.S. Lewis.” Nearly fifty years later, this study in medieval tradition is unsurpassed in its wealth of historical information and brilliance of critical insights. One of the ironies of Lewis’s career is that most of his admirers throughout the world know him only as a gifted and inspired amateur; few readers outside his own field ever knew him as a professional and an expert.

As a young Oxford don, Lewis followed a familiar path. By his early thirties, he had published four book reviews, two literary letters, and two slim volumes of poetry. He had one essay rejected by T.S. Eliot, editor of Criterion, and another (on Chaucer) published in Essays and Studies. Finally in 1935, the Oxford University Press accepted The Allegory of Love and contracted him to write the volume on the sixteenth century in the Oxford History of English Literature series. He won immediate academic praise and the Gollancz prize for his first book, and by the time English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) came out in 1954, he was famous for books of very different kinds. A version of the essay Eliot had rejected, “Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism,” appeared in Essays and Studies in 1942, the year The Screwtape Letters came out as a book (following serialization in the Guardian in 1941). For the rest of his life, Lewis published historical and critical works as regularly as the Christian apologetics and fiction on which his present fame is principally based.

One explanation of Lewis’s productivity, as well as his mastery, is the close relationship between his teaching and his scholarship. All of the scholarly books after The Allegory of Love were based either on regular university courses of lectures or on special series. A Preface to Paradise Lost is a revised and enlarged version of a lecture series at University College, North Wales, in 1941; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century is the completion of a lecture series at Cambridge in 1944; Studies in Words is based on lectures at Cambridge in the late 1950s, as well as on years of tutorial experience with Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts; and The Discarded Image, as Lewis says in the preface, “is based on a course of lectures given more than once at Oxford. Some who attended it have expressed a wish that its substance might be given a more permanent form.” He refers with characteristic modesty to his “Prolegomena to Medieval Studies” course, which with its companion “Prolegomena to Renaissance Studies” attracted crowds of undergraduates for years. This last book was already in the press when Lewis died. He was planning another book based on the notes for his Cambridge lectures on Spenser. His friend and colleague Alastair Fowler used this material to produce Spenser’s Images of Life, of which the editor says, “if Lewis himself had lived to write the book it might have stood out among his works as a critical new departure.”

In addition to these major works, Lewis published many essays and critical articles originally delivered as lectures or talks. In contrast to many American academics, who write scholarly papers and then read them to conference audiences, Lewis usually spoke from copious notes and afterwards revised them for publication.

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