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  • Volume 39 (2023)

    Discovering a legendary author’s previously unpublished writing is part of the sleuthing magic of scholarship. This volume of VII shares some of that newly unearthed work and sends out a call for readers to join in finding more.

    Volume 39 features twelve previously unpublished letters from C.S. Lewis, written during his tenure as general editor for the Nelson’s Medieval and Renaissance Library series. Steven Beebe and Joel Heck show how these letters reveal a rarely seen professional side of the man best known for his spiritual insight and fantastical imagination. All of these letters, part of a recently acquired archive of correspondence, are transcribed here, along with several photographs of the originals.

    Continuing to explore more deeply into the life and writings of Lewis, Clark Moreland analyzes Lewis’s response to the Cold War and the possible shift that the threat of apocalypse generated in Lewis’s thinking about war. And Carrie Birmingham examines Lewis’s preoccupation with his days as a public schoolboy and seeks to answer a common question: why did Lewis devote an outsized amount of space in Surprised by Joy to the travails of that period in his life?

    While Volume 39 is largely filled with Lewis scholarship, it also features a piece on Lewis’s contemporary and interlocutor, Dorothy L. Sayers. Kathryn Wehr looks at the source text for Sayers’s Canterbury play, The Zeal of Thy House, and shows where Sayers’s version of the fire and rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral both diverges from and aligns with that original telling in order to elevate the story.

    Book reviews of recent publications, as well as remembrances of colleagues whose friendship and scholarship will be missed, round out this volume of VII. Finally, along with other Inklings-related publications and institutions, VII offers an exciting opportunity for crowd-sourcing original—as yet unpublished—letters from C.S. Lewis. More details are in Volume 39!

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  • Volume 38 (2021/2022)

    Literary scholarship has the potential to illuminate literature in diverse ways. In this volume of VII, scholars shine the lights of their research and analysis in three particular directions: toward authors’ lives, toward authors’ thought, and toward authors’ work.

    Volume 38 of VII features a letter from the eminent Swiss theologian Karl Barth to Dorothy L. Sayers, translated into English for the first time. As translator of this and of Barth’s foreword to the German edition of The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, David W. McNutt illuminates the two writers’ little-known interaction, showing how their thinking and their brief epistolary relationship shaped them both.

    Also in this volume, Graham Shea and Doug Jackson turn the lights of their scholarship onto the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in two separate articles, giving new texture to old legends about the author and demonstrating how Tolkien, in creating worlds beyond our lived experiences, illuminated some of the deepest truths of human existence. David Rozema dives into C.S. Lewis’s unfinished, but still disputed and disparaged, novel The Dark Tower, shining a light into the recesses of one of Lewis’s darkest writings to find the value that lies there. And Landon Loftin scours the work of Owen Barfield to reveal how his philosophies of nature and humanity oriented him toward meaning-making in a context that despaired of hope and purpose.

    Volume 38 also contains many images that shine in full color here in this digital format.

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  • Volume 37 (2020)

    Our usual practice is to publish the print and digital versions of our new volume of VII simultaneously. However, this year we have made an exception due to our desire to make a number of remembrances available as timely as possible. As a result, the digital version of volume 37 of VII is now available online while our print version will not ship until sometime in January 2021. However, subscribers still have the option to order either the digital or print version (or both) of volume 37.

    Volume 37 explores several works by Wade authors: Owen Barfield, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Additionally, many articles in this issue consider the work of these authors in relation to one another.

    Josiah Peterson and Charlie W. Starr share their discovery of unpublished notes that formed the basis for C.S. Lewis’s “Paper on Reason to the Socratic Club.” Tiffany Brooke Martin explores a timely and terrifying short story, Night Operation, by Owen Barfield that “deserve[s] to be better known.” Toby F. Coley analyzes the sacramental ontology woven into Lewis’s final novel in the Ransom Trilogy, That Hideous Strength; while David Bratman traces the history of Tolkien’s Lost Road and Lewis’s enigmatic references to Numenor in That Hideous Strength. Finally, Harry Lee Poe decodes Dorothy L. Sayers prodigious insights into Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to detective fiction, and Don W. King unpacks the gift of Warren H. Lewis housed at the Marion E. Wade Center, The Lewis Family Papers.

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