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Leland Ryken has a new series of short books, providing Christian Guides to the Classics. Think of it as a higher-quality version of CliffsNotes from a Christian perspective.

Currently available are his guides to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Homer’s The Odyssey, Milton’s The Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Over the next couple of years Crossway will also publish his guides to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Dickens’ Great Expectations, the devotional Poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Milton, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Each guide

  • includes an introduction to the author and work
  • explains the cultural context
  • incorporates published criticism
  • contains discussion questions at the end of each unit of the text
  • defines key literary terms
  • lists resources for further study
  • evaluates the classic text from a Christian worldview

Gene Veith writes: “Students, teachers, homeschoolers, general readers, and even seasoned literature professors like me will find these Christian guides to classic works of literature invaluable. They demonstrate just what is so great about these ‘great books’ and illuminate their meanings in light of Christian truth. Reading these books along with the masterpieces they accompany is a literary education in itself, and there can be few better tutors and reading companions than Leland Ryken, a master Christian scholar and teacher.”

Here’s an excerpt from Dr. Ryken on what the classics are and why they matter.


This book belongs to a series of guides to the literary classics of Western literature. We live at a time when the concept of a literary classic is often misunderstood and when the classics themselves are often undervalued or even attacked. The very concept of a classic will rise in our estimation if we simply understand what it is.

What is a classic?

To begin, the term classic implies the best in its class. The first hurdle that a classic needs to pass is excellence. Excellent according to whom? This brings us to a second part of our definition: classics have stood the test of time through the centuries. The human race itself determines what works rise to the status of classics. That needs to be qualified slightly: the classics are especially known and valued by people who have received a formal education, alerting us that the classics form an important part of the education that takes place within a culture.

This leads us to yet another aspect of classics: classics are known to us not only in themselves but also in terms of their interpretation and reinterpretation through the ages. We know a classic partly in terms of the attitudes and interpretations that have become attached to it through the centuries.

Why read the classics?

The first good reason to read the classics is that they represent the best. The fact that they are difficult to read is a mark in their favor; within certain limits, of course, works of literature that demand a lot from us will always yield more than works that demand little of us. If we have a taste for what is excellent, we will automatically want some contact with classics. They offer more enjoyment, more understanding about human experience, and more richness of ideas and thought than lesser works (which we can also legitimately read). We finish reading or rereading a classic with a sense of having risen higher than we would otherwise have risen.

Additionally, to know the classics is to know the past, and with that knowledge comes a type of power and mastery. If we know the past, we are in some measure protected from the limitations that come when all we know is the contemporary. Finally, to know the classics is to be an educated person. Not to know them is, intellectually and culturally speaking, like walking around without an arm or leg.
Summary. Here are four definitions of a literary classic from literary experts; each one provides an angle on why the classics matter.

(1) The best that has been thought and said (Matthew Arnold).

(2) “A literary classic ranks with the best of its kind that have been produced” (Harper Handbook to Literature).

(3) A classic “lays its images permanently on the mind [and] is entirely irreplaceable in the sense that no other book whatever comes anywhere near reminding you of it or being even a momentary substitute for it” (C. S. Lewis).

(4) Classics are works to which “we return time and again in our minds, even if we do not reread them frequently, as touchstones by which we interpret the world around us” (Nina Baym).

 

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