The Discarded Image

Content Warning: This section includes descriptions of racist attitudes and biases put forth by the author.

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a prolific British writer, lay theologian, and Oxford professor of literature. Over the course of his life, he published more than 10 novels, two books about Christian theology, and many essays, novellas, and treatises, along with several collections of poems. In The Discarded Image, Lewis demonstrates the full scope and depth of his literary expertise. Lewis’s role in this book is that of a guide or even a kind of literary psychopomp who steers readers through the convoluted landscape of medieval literature. He assumes that his readers are literature students with a working knowledge of many of the texts and authors that he mentions. This positioning reflects the fact that The Discarded Image is adapted from a lecture series that he gave while teaching at Oxford University. Collecting the series into physical form is a way for Lewis to make his teachings accessible to any curious mind wanting to better understand The Medieval Relationship to Literature.

Just as writers like Apuleius brought Plato’s ideas to the Medieval Era, so too does Lewis bring medieval ideas to the present.