The following is an UPDATED version of a piece I posted just yesterday morning only at my “old” C.S. Lewis Minute blog and not here at the new (umbrella) site. It contains ADDITIONAL information provided to me by Walter Hooper in response to an email I sent to him.
If you don’t count the unpublished letters by C.S. Lewis released over the last decade it has been a while since anything never before published from him has been released. Another exception is a book by Dr. Charlie W. Starr (Light: C. S. Lewis’s First and Final Short Story) that revealed and analyzed a version of a short story by Lewis that hadn’t been previous available.
As Walter Hooper proposed to Cambridge University Press, 2013 would be the perfect time to release material by Lewis that prior to now hadn’t been available since first published. Plus, there were some essays difficult to obtain because of only being in books now out-of-print. The new title, Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews, is the result of what could be the final effort by Hooper to edit a collection of pieces by Lewis. It contains all of the book reviews not previously printed (and include two that where not even mentioned in Hooper’s Companion and Guide), several difficult to obtain essays and a new essay that is featured on the title. The contents of this book, as Hooper stated to the publisher “will appeal principally to anyone with general interests in literature and religion, as well as those who have a particular regard for the academic work of C.S. Lewis.” He also noted that this new book could be seen as a companion to his previously edited Selected Literary Essays.
In my previous post at C.S. Lewis Minute I listed the forty book reviews I thought would be in the book. In the email reply I received from Hooper, he noted that the 23rd and 33rd items listed would not appear because they were already in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and it was being reprinted in November. The two reviews not listed in Hooper’s volume from the late 1990’s are items he pointed out were included in the 2005 Remembering C.S. Lewis, edited by James Como. They are previously unsigned “reviews of Ebreo’s Philosophy of Love (1938) and Knox’s Occasional Sermons.”
According the the proposal that Hooper kindly provided to me, the essays in Image and Imagination are (or at least, were planned to be):
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“The Idea of an ‘English School’”
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“Our English Syllabus”
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“The English Prose Morte”
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Preface from Essays Presented to Charles Williams
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“Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945)” An obituary notice
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“Oliver Elton (1861-1945)” An obituary notice
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“Image and Imagination”
The last piece is the only item never published previously in any place. In an email from Hooper he said he thought it “was written about 1933.” He also shared the following which he stated would be in the introduction to the new book:
“The third long essay, ‘Image and Imagination’ appears here for the first time. It is a philosophical analysis of the way an ‘image’ may inspire ‘imagination’ and vice versa. In a way, ‘Image and Imagination’ is analogous to Tolkien’s famous story ‘Leaf by Niggle.’ Both are conceptual treatments of what is happening when an author creates an imaginary world.”
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RELATED POSTS:
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Retro Column
Business of Heaven: Edited by Walter Hooper in Retro Column