In the following essay, Schakel examines elements of satire in Lewis's fiction. Schakel asserts that "Lewis's success as a satirist, which has not been sufficiently taken into account in previous studies of Lewis, must be given attention if Lewis's works, and his literary imagination, are to be fully understood."

In the following essay, Meilaender examines Lewis's ability to illustrate the spiritual significance of commonplace experience. For Lewis, Meilaender notes, "the whole of life … every ordinary and everyday moment of it, every choice that we make, is charged with the significance of an eternal either/or."

In the following essay, Nelson provides an overview of Lewis's literary career and intellectual development.

In the following essay, Piehler examines Lewis's critical study of allegory, historical varieties of allegory, and the use of allegory in Lewis's fiction.

In the following essay, Johnson and Houtman examine references to the philosophical investigations of Plato in Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. According to the critics, Lewis frequently incorporates Platonic concepts found in The Republic, in particular the famous Allegory of the Cave.

In the following essay, Packer discusses Lewis's literary career, religious beliefs, and popularity among Christians.

In the following essay, Meilaender discusses the significance of Christian storytelling and the human longing for divine communion in Lewis's fiction. According to Meilaender, "Lewis offers not abstract propositions for belief but the quality, the feel, of living in the world narrated by the biblical story."

Lewis talks about male and female so often that it is hard to know where to begin, or indeed what to leave out [of an essay on his view of the subject]…. Why does this theme appear so often, and in so many different guises—as poetry, essay, fiction and myth? For Lewis, the reason is simple. Masculine and feminine are not merely curious facts about biological existence; they reflect the very structure of the universe. To understand the enigma of masculine and feminine is to have approached the ...

In the following essay, Bonsor discusses Lewis's personal life and relationships as revealed in All My Road Before Me.

In the following essay, West discusses Lewis's views on government, political action, and public morality. According to West, "Lewis championed the time-honored idea of natural law—the belief that the fundamental maxims of civic morality are accessible to all human beings by virtue of their God-given reason."

It is not hard to enumerate the assets that Lewis brought with him when he set out to be a writer. First of all, intelligence. His mind, sharpened by lifelong training, was formidable in its power and precision. One can disagree with him to the point of fury, but not condescend. Coupled with the superb mind was solid erudition. He was master of classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature, so much at home in it that he could make use of its symbols and themes with unconscious ease and grace. Greek and Ro...

The popular reputation of C. S. Lewis depends to a large extent upon his prominence as a modern day "apostle to the skeptics." His theological writings are designed for and directed toward skeptical laymen who have been, in Lewis's opinion, unduly influenced by nineteenth-century liberalism and scientism and so have left the Church for the greener pastures of "humane science." Lewis's theological writings are thus designed to woo mankind away from the laboratories a...

In the following essay, Person discusses the enduring popularity, major themes, and critical reception of Lewis's writings.

In the orderly cosmos of his Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet [1938], Perelandra [1943], That Hideous Strength [1945]), Lewis repeatedly presents his characters (both terrestrial and celestial) speaking and acting in accordance with a system of propriety which literary theorists label decorum…. [Lewis uses various] examples of generic variety and propriety to demonstrate both the plenitude of being that fills Maleldil's (Christ's) fertile universe and the cosmic harmony by which ...

There must be profound reasons why wars spawn so many quack religions and Messiahs, but to discover them would require an exhaustive psychological study of the relations of war and peace to personal insecurity. On a lower level, we may wonder at the alarming vogue of Mr. C. S. Lewis, whose harmless fantasies about the kingdoms of Good and Evil ("Out of the Silent Planet," "The Screwtape Letters" and now "Perelandra") have had a modest literary success, while multitu...

This author is of course well known as a controversialist—indeed my view is that the death of George Orwell left Mr. Lewis standing alone as our major controversial author—and while controversialists are common enough in the world of letters, they do not usually get asked to contribute to a 'safe' academic series like the Oxford History of English Literature. So it is important to begin by saying that the controversial nature of the book [English Literature in the Sixteenth Centu...

[While serving as a professor at Cambridge, Lewis wrote An Experiment in Criticism in response to the increasingly popular critical theories of his fellow Cambridge don, F. R. Leavis. Lewis believed that Leavis wrongly placed critical emphasis on the subjective extraction of meaning from literary texts, rather than on simply receiving and evaluating them according to the authors' own purposes. Kermode, himself a distinguished critic, saw much to Lewis's approach.] Modern criticism, perhaps bec...

[An anonymous critic provided the only review of Lewis's first book, a collection of traditional poetry written under the pseudonym "Clive Hamilton" and titled Spirits in Bondage.] These lyrics are always graceful and polished, and their varied themes are chosen from those which naturally attract poets—the Autumn Morning, Oxford, Lullaby, The Witch, Milton Read Again, and so on. The thought, when closed with, is found rather often not to rise above the commonplace. The piece whic...