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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