The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition by C. S. Lewis

Despite having no religious affiliation, I absolutely adore C. S. Lewis, not just The Chronicles of Narnia (that's obvious), I find his writing to be incredibly magical and just the right combination of imaginative, down-to-earth, and somehow... wholesome? I can't think of a better word, it's very satisfying and deceptively simple. This is a very outdated (1936) study of medieval literature, but it's certainly the most unusual and impassioned piece of literary criticism I've ever read. And though I say 'outdated', it actually introduced so many concepts that we now take for granted, that most of it (though definitely not all) is extremely true and relevant. I think that one of the most important ideas in this book is the challenge to the way we tend to see literature; as a linear progression towards the technical apex of the novel form, which encompasses everything. Lewis shows how other genres (specifically medieval allegory) fulfilled for its time the needs the novel does for us, how it was a literary and creative expression just as powerful as the novel. In an age when writers are starting to move beyond the framework of the novel, I think this idea is especially relevant. This is a great introduction to understanding allegory, and though Lewis tends to use a little too much Latin (this was, after all, written at a time when 'The Classics' were part of the university curriculum and Lewis is clearly aiming at an audience with a specific level of education), it is written in a very lucid and beautifully explained way. And Lewis's passion for his subject matter is evident everywhere in the text, it's certainly worlds away from the detached, dry, jargon-filled style which we associate with literary criticism today.

Quote:

It is difficult for the modern man of letters to value this quiet revolution as it deserves. We are apt to take it for granted that a poet has at his command, besides the actual world and the world of his own religion, a third world of myth and fancy. The probable, the marvellous-taken-as-fact, the marvellous-known-to-be-fiction – such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three world which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to. London and Warwick, Heaven and Hell, Fairyland and Prospero’s Island – each has its own laws and its appropriate poetry. But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginning of any literature and you will not find it. At the beginning the only marvels are the marvels which are taken for fact. The poet has only two of these three worlds. In the fullness of time the third world crept in, but only by a sort of accident. The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils: that, we know, is what happened to our incalculable loss in the history of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its ‘third world’ of romantic imagining. And when they rose they were changed and gave to poetry that which poetry had scarcely had before.