William Gray

Drawing on philosophy, theology and psychoanalysis as well as on literary criticism, this collection of essays explores a range of fantasy texts with particular attention to the various ways in which they seek to deal with the reality of death. The essays uncover some fascinating links, and indeed tensions, between the writers discussed.

More than most writers, Robert Louis Stevenson requires a Literary Life. Fascination with Stevenson's life (the 'Stevenson biography' is almost a minor genre) has tended to eclipse his literary achievement. This study focuses on Stevenson's writing practice within the different geographical, cultural and political contexts that shaped it, from Scotland to the South Seas. Following Stevenson's own views on biography, the book is not structured primarily in terms of chronology, but is more a kind of literary geography than traditional literary history.

The works of C.S. Lewis have a wide appeal to a variety of audiences. Lewis is probably most famous for the best-selling The Chronicles of Narnia, although William Nicholson’s Shadowlands will have led many readers to Lewis’s own account of his tragic bereavement in A Grief Observed. However, Shadowlands represents only a small part of Lewis’s controversial life, and omits much that is crucial to an understanding of this fascinating, and in some ways tormented, personality. Lewis enjoyed (to the chagrin of his academic colleagues) a tremendous success as a popular theologian. He was also a successful science fiction writer. And last, but by no means least, he was a brilliant and original academic in the field of English Studies. This book weaves together the very different elements in the complex phenomenon of C.S Lewis, and relates the central concerns of Lewis’s life and work to current thinking about postmodernism, psychoanalysis and the idea of ‘a new Humanism’.