C. S. Lewis on Stories

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Published: Jun 30, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2022-1-0302
Keywords:
the Inklings C. S. Lewis fantasy stories the poetic element writing for children

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Paul E. Michelson
Huntington University, U.S.A.

Abstract

The paper is an exposition and synthesis of C. S. Lewis’s ideas on story as elaborated in his essay “On Stories” in the Charles Williams festschrift (1947). The purpose of Lewis’s essay was to flush out of the underbrush of literature what distinguishes true Story (with a capital letter “S”) from story as mere entertainment. The paper concludes that a key to Lewis’s essay on stories is to be found in his initial vocation as a poet and his ideas about poetic imagination.

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Michelson, P. E. . “C. S. Lewis on Stories”. Linguaculture, vol. 13, no. 1, June 2022, pp. 13-37, doi:10.47743/lincu-2022-1-0302.
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Vol. 13 No. 1 (2022)
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Paul E. Michelson, Huntington University, U.S.A.

PAUL E. MICHELSON is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Huntington University in Indiana. He is past President (2006-2009) and Secretary (1977-2015) of The Society for Romanian Studies and served as Secretary of The Conference on Faith and History from 2004 to 2014. His website is www.pmichelson.com

He was three times a Fulbright fellow in Romania and his book, Romanian Politics, 1859-1871: From Prince Cuza to Prince Carol (1998) was was selected by CHOICE MAGAZINE of the American Library Association as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1998 and was awarded the 2000 Bălcescu Prize for History by the Romanian Academy. He is an honorary member of the Romanian Academy’s History Institutes in Iași, București, and Cluj. His areas of interest and expertise include historiography, Romanian history in the 19th-21st Centuries, Totalitarian and post-Totalitarian societies, the History of Venice, and the writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Inklings.

Recent publications on the Inklings include” W. H. Lewis: A Bibliographical Excursus,” in Teodora Ghiviriga and Denise Vasiliu, eds., C. S. Lewis: His Life and Heritage (Iași: Editura Universității Alexandru Ioan Cuza, 2021), pp. 71-92; “J. R. R. Tolkien on Faërie and Faërie-stories,” Linguaculture, Vol. 10 (2019), Nr. 2, pp. 81-99; and” W. H. Lewis, Writer and Historian: A Prolegomena,” in Joe Ricke and Ashley Chu, eds., The Faithful Imagination. Papers from the 2018 Francis White Ewbank Colloquium on C. S. Lewis and Friends, Taylor University (Hamden CT: Winged Lion Press, 2019, pp. 256-269).

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