Dear readers:
Throughout this whole month, the ebook of The Inklings and King Arthur is on sale for $4.99. You can purchase it here. If you’re not sure whether it’s relevant to you, well, please read this blurb and Table of Contents to help you decide:
Will King Arthur ever return to England? He already has.
In the midst of war-torn Britain, King Arthur returned in the writings of the Oxford Inklings. Learn how J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield brought hope to their times and our own in their Arthurian literature.
Although studies of the “Oxford Inklings” abound, astonishingly enough, none has yet examined their great body of Arthurian work. Yet each of these major writers tackled serious and relevant questions about government, gender, violence, imperialism, secularism, and spirituality through their stories of the Quest for the Holy Grail. This rigorous and sophisticated volume studies does so for the first time.
“This serious and substantial volume addresses a complex subject that scholars have for too long overlooked,” writes Michael Ward. “The contributors show how, in the legends of King Arthur, the Inklings found material not only for escape and consolation, but also, and more importantly, for exploring moral and spiritual questions of pressing contemporary concern.” Owen A. Barfield, grandson of the Inkling, calls it an “impressive collection of essays.” and adds: “The list of contributors reads as a Who’s Who in the field of Inkling Studies. This valuable work would be a fine addition to the shelves of scholars and thinkers everywhere.” Prof. Michael D.C. Drout claims: “This book is essential reading, not only for scholars of fantasy literature, but for all those interested in understanding how traditions and writers shape each other.” It has also been endorsed by Helen Fulton, Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, Grevel Lindop, Don W. King, Lyle Dorsett, John Rateliff, the Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, and others.
The Inklings & King Arthur won the 2018 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award.
Table of Contents:
1. The Matter of Logres: Arthuriana and the Inklings. Sørina Higgins
2. Medieval Arthurian Sources for the Inklings: An Overview. Holly Ordway
3. Mixed Metaphors and Hyperlinked Worlds: A Study of Intertextuality in C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Cycle. Brenton D. G. Dickieson
4. Houses of Healing: The Idea of Avalon in Inklings Fiction and Poetry. Charles A. Huttar
5. Shape and Direction: Human Consciousness in the Inklings’ Mythological Geographies. Christopher Gaertner
6. From Myth to History and Back Again: Inklings Arthuriana in Historical Context. Yannick Imbert
7. “All Men Live by Tales”: Chesterton’s Arthurian Poems. J. Cameron Moore
8. The Elegiac Fantasy of Past Christendom in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur. Cory Grewell
9. Spiritual Quest in a Scientific Age. Jason Jewell and Chris Butynskyi
10. “The Stripped Banner”: Reading The Fall of Arthur as a Post-World War I Text. Taylor Driggers
11. “Lilacs Out of the Dead Land”: Narnia, The Waste Land, and the World Wars. Jon Hooper
12. “What Does the Line along the Rivers Define?”: Charles Williams’s Arthuriad and the Rhetoric of Empire. Benjamin D. Utter
13. “Fair as Fay-woman and Fell-minded”: Tolkien’s Guinever. Alyssa House-Thomas
14. Beatrice and Byzantium: Sex and the City in the Arthurian Works of Charles Williams. Andrew Rasmussen
15. Those Kings of Lewis’s Logres: Arthurian Figures as Lewisian Genders in That Hideous Strength. Benjamin Shogren
16. “Servant of All”: Arthurian Peregrinations in George MacDonald. Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson
17. Camelot Incarnate: Arthurian Vision in the Early Plays of Charles Williams. Bradley Wells
18. “Any Chalice of Consecrated Wine”: The Significance of the Holy Grail in Charles Williams’s War in Heaven. Suzanne Bray
19. The Acts of Unity: The Eucharistic Theology of Charles Williams’s Arthurian Poetry. Andrew C. Stout Conclusion—Once and Future: The Inklings, Arthur, and Prophetic Insight. Malcolm Guite
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