Paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This, Lewis's last book, has been hailed as 'the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind'.

For over half a century, scholars have laboured to show that C. S. Lewis's famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery. Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In Planet Narnia he demonstrates that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to the seven novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis's writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward reveals how the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets - - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn - - planets which Lewis described as "spiritual symbols of permanent value" and "especially worthwhile in our own generation". Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that in each book the plot-line, the ornamental details, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality. The cosmological theme of each Chronicle is what Lewis called 'the kappa element in romance', the atmospheric essence of a story, everywhere present but nowhere explicit. The reader inhabits this atmosphere and thus imaginatively gains connaître knowledge of the spiritual character which the tale was created to embody. Planet Narnia is a ground-breaking study that will provoke a major revaluation not only of the Chronicles, but of Lewis's whole literary and theological outlook. Ward uncovers a much subtler writer and thinker than has previously been recognized, whose central interests were hiddenness, immanence, and knowledge by acquaintance.

An invaluable collection for those who read and love Lewis and medieval and Renaissance literature.

"An unorthodox investigative literary biography of a mysterious graphomaniac whose nearly 150 diaries are rescued from a dumpster by the author"--

This book was compiled by Alastair Fowler from notes left by C. S. Lewis at his death. It is Lewis's longest piece of literary criticism, as distinct from literary history. It approaches The Faerie Queene as a majestic pageant of the universe and nature, celebrating God as 'the glad creator', and argues that conventional views of epic and allegory must be modified if the poem is to be fully enjoyed and understood.

This book is a powerful tool for understanding fiction and for transforming creative writing and taking it to new levels of clarity, energy and effectiveness. Learn what a story really is and what it is actually doing to and for readers, how all successful fiction follows universal patterns to attract and grip readers, the magnetic power that draws readers into a work of fiction even before the introduction of any character, what the thing called a 'character' actually is, and the secrets of how to rapidly build a convincing one that attracts readers, the things called 'plots', what they are and how they are actually made (rather than how you might suppose they are made). Find out about the writing model which, if followed, will create a machine generating unimaginable numbers of readers and heightened reader satisfaction for you, based on some of the most successful pieces of literature in the English-speaking world.

C. S. Lewis explores the fascination with language by taking a series of words and teasing out their connotations.