The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature - eBook

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics in The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.

“Erudite and graceful, filled with anecdote and analogy, illuminating the images of the past.” - Los Angeles Times
“Nobody else could have imposed such form on such a mass of matter, and written a book so wide in scope and implication and so curious in discovering the rare, the remote, but the exact, example. And where else in modern literary scholarship can we find so generous and enthusiastic a temper? Whether we were his pupils in the classroom or not, we are all his pupil and we shall not look upon his like again.” - The Listener
“If not magnum opus, it represents Lewis the expositor at his best, and communicates the zest that he brought to the study of literature, philosophy and religion alike.” - London Times Literary Supplement
“An amateur medievalist is left gasping that any man who gave so much of his life to other studies could possibly have known so much about medieval literature and read so many of its Great Clerks. Over and over again he gives a list of medieval authorities on this subject or that, and says that they will all be well known to every educated man. It is very disconcerting when a lifelong student of things medieval realizes that at least some of the names on Lewis’s list are entirely unknown to him. But, if the book sometimes daunts, it nearly always entrances. Though it describes a model which has passed away into a mist, it testifies in its reverence for those who made it to the greatness of the human mind.” - The Church Times
“The printed page transmits only part of the zest with which Lewis in his lectures demonstrated this double process, but it is invaluable to have the most famous set from the university courses preserved for posterity.” - New Statesman
“We thought to have no more from that gifted pen: it seemed as though the fruit of that reading had passed beyond our reach…The Discarded Image…is worth having, if only for the experience of having so genial an interpreter to guide through the realms of gold.” - The Ampleforth Journal
“Nobody else could have imposed such form on such a mass of matter, and written a book so wide in scope. Whether we were his pupils in the classroom or no, we are all his pupil and we shall not look upon his like again.” - The Listener
“It does you good to read [Lewis’s] learned books, not because you are preached at, but because to read them is for the mind what a walk over fine, sometimes rough, country, in good weather is for the healthy body.” - Birmingham Post
“If the book sometimes daunts, it nearly always entrances, and, though it describes a model which has passed away into a mist, it testifies, in its reverence, for those who made it, to the greatness of the human mind.” - The Church Times