Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Abstract

Excerpt: "Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis were writers who thought deeply about the creative imagination, the creative process, and the relation of these to their Christian faith. Both were practitioners, as well as theorists, producing multiple works of fiction, drama, apologetics, and poetry. Both wrote for a variety of audiences including scholarly and popular and believed that literary works could be entertaining as well as edifying, could both delight and teach, as the classical and renaissance writers put it. Finally, both authors addressed the creative imagination in their essays, books, and letters. While a comprehensive treatment of their respective theories of the creative imagination would require a book-length study, my aim is to describe each writer's theoretical view and to explore one particular disagreement that arose between the two in response to Sayers's book, The Mind of the Make1: 1 Finally, I hope to provide some explanation for the different views by looking at two addresses, one by Lewis and one by Sayers, in which each author attempts to formulate a Christian aesthetic."

Comments

Originally published as a chapter in The Faithful Imagination: Papers From the 2018 Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends, Taylor University, edited by Joe Ricke and Ashley Chu, Winged Lion Press 2019.

http://www.wingedlionpress.com/faithful_imagination.html

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