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170 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE "how it feels" to believe or live in a certain framework other than their own. He commended readers for the ability to "pass in and out freely among the various worlds of poetic creation" (215). In his essay on Goethe, he encourages readers not merely to "suspend ... disbelief, but to try to put ... [themselves] in the position of believer:' As provisional believer, the reader will find "aWisdom that we all accept;' for "it is precisely for the sake of learning Wisdom that we must take the trouble to frequent" unfamiliar authors (cited by Meyer and Deshen 249). Even though Reading the Underthought qualifies Eliot's suggestions for dealing with the problem of belief by seeking a common Wisdom (Meyer and Deshen assert such a Wisdom is not theological, objective, or universal), this book will stimulate readers from all traditions to consider their assumptions in reading texts by the Other for both its underthought and its overthought. David J. Leigh, S. J. Seattle University The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis. Edited by Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-52171114 -2. Pp. xx + 328. £18.99. The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis is another welcome addition to the growing number of scholarly treatments of C. S. Lewis. Although, curiously, it is a part of the Cambridge Companions to Religion rather than the Cambridge Companions to Literature-suggesting perhaps that Lewis has still not quite passed literary muster with the decision-makers at Cambridge University Press-it is nonetheless a valuable resource for those looking for competent though brief, scholarly treatments of Lewis as scholar, thinker, and writer. In part one, "Lewis as Scholar;' editors Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward have collected essays on Lewis as a literary critic, literary theorist, intellectual historian, and classicist. Stephen Logan's"Literary Theorist" is the most compelling and intellectually nuanced piece in this group of essays. After distinguishing between two understandings of literary theory-on one hand, "the practice of reflecting philosophically on the nature and function of literature" (29) and on the other hand, "a matter of trying to say what literature is, how it differs from other kinds of writing (if it does), and how we form a sense of a literary text means" (30)-Logan says that there is little doubt Lewis made a contribution as a literary theorist in the first "traditional" sense, but "that its application to Lewis becomes doubtful, even preposterous" (30) in the second "contemporary" sense. Logan goes on to rightly point out that this second sense of literary theory only "assumed its BOOK REVIEWS 171 distinctive forms in the period after Lewis'sdeath in 1963 ... being determined by the ideological tendencies of a group of European intellectuals between the late sixties and the turn of the millennium" (30). Moreover, Logan incisively notes that "the contrast between the traditional and contemporary forms of literary theory is ultimately moral and metaphysical" (30). Logan then offers an overview of Lewis as a literary theorist in the traditional sense, noting in particular that he "was a philosopher before he was a literaryscholar and a poet before either;' and thus "implicitly at odds with the theoretical (second sense) dimensions of modern academic studies" (31). In fleshing out his arguments, Logan cites The Personal Heresy (1939), Studies in Words (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and he makes passing reference to "De Descriptione Temporum" (1954), Lewis'inaugural lecture as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. Logan's concluding remarks offer a concise summary of his view of Lewis as literary theorist: Lewis' achievements in the field of literary theory are unique. He is the writer who most incisively and insistently comments on the moral and metaphysical infrastructure of literary and critical art, while having the most exuberantly appreciative appetite for literary artistry. He sees the metaphysics in a metaphor and feels the ache or the exhilaration encompassed in a cadence. Most of all, he suffers an existential loneliness for which, in the personal but self-transcending worlds of literature, he sought vivid reassurances of a final cure. The examination of Lewis as a literary theorist takes us a long...

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