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. 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. Jeffrey Rethinking the Future of the University (1998).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. Eliot and Dante (1989 reprint 2015), as well as co-authoring with David L. He is the author of Joyce’s Politics (1980 reprint 2016), T.S. He has examined in particular the literary impact of Dante’s medieval masterpiece on the Christian imagination of the Inklings. He has written extensively on canonical modern authors, focusing in recent years on the neo-medievalism of a group of writers that includes Wendell Berry, G.K. In the lecture, I will focus on some representative scenes from these novels in which Lewis, like Dante before him, presents the dynamics of love as the “drama of the soul’s choice.”ĭominic Manganiello has been a Professor of English Literature at the University of Ottawa for many years and was a founding member of Augustine College. He adopted Dante’s literary technique of the dream vision notably in The Great Divorce and in Till We Have Faces to illustrate the key notion that love involves the exercise of free will and moral choice. These treatments of an individual’s changing perceptions of love inspired Lewis to explore many variations of the virtues and perils of affection in his own fiction. Lewis became captivated also by Dante’s account in the Vita Nuova (The New Life) of how, after a number of wrong turnings, he had come to understand the true nature of love and was eventually led to salvation by the greeting of a young girl named Beatrice. Dante, in fact, had used the Augustinian exhortation, “set loves in order,” as the epigraph for the second part of the Comedy. Augustine’s affective theology which was based on the understanding of virtue as rightly ordered love. Like his great medieval predecessor, Lewis was steeped in St. Lewis in particular hailed Dante as “a strong candidate for the supreme poetical honours of the world,” and drew inspiration from the Florentine poet’s literary masterpiece and other writings for his own project of infusing new life into old tales. The brilliance of The Divine Comedy radiated widely over several generations of twentieth-century writers, including the Inklings.

The luminous figure of Dante cast a long shadow over the modern literary imagination. Lewis and Dante, was given by Dominic Manganiello: Our 21st annual Weston Lecture, titled Visions and Re-visions of Love: C.S.

Love cs lewis