Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea": A Critical Companion

by Timothy S. Miller

Overview

Written not so long after "Tolkien mania" first gripped the United States in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) has long been recognized as a classic of the fantasy genre, and the series of Earthsea books that followed on it over the next several decades earned its author both considerable sales and critical accolades. This new introduction to the text will closely contextualize the original novel in relation to its heady decade of composition and publication — a momentous time for genre publishing — and also survey the half century and more of scholarship on Earthsea, which has shifted in direction and emphasis many times over the decades, just as surely as Le Guin frequently adjusted her own sails when composing later works set in the fantasy world. Above all, this book positions A Wizard of Earthsea as perhaps an "old text" that nevertheless belongs in a "new canon," a key novel in the author's career and the genre in which it participates, and one that at once looks back to Tolkien and his own antecedents in masculinist early fantasy; looks forward to Le Guin's own continuing feminist and progressive education; and anticipates and indeed helped to shape young adult literature in its contemporary form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031246401
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	03/01/2023
Series:	Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	332 KB

About the Author

Timothy S. Miller is Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, USA.

Table of Contents

1 The Boy Wizard and the Young Grand Master.- References.- 2 BetweenChildren’s Literature and “Adult Fantasy”: The Antecedents and Audiences of A Wizard of Earthsea.-Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Old King Arthur: Earthsea and Its Predecessors.- Earthsea Pedagogies: Learning to Live in an Enchanted World.- References.-3 Fantasy and the Weight of Whiteness: Racial Dynamics in Earthsea.- A Wizard of Earthsea in Black and White: Uncoupling Whiteness and Goodness.- Illustration, Adaptation, and the Racial Politics of the Visual Imagination.- References.-4 Light and Shadow, Good and Evil: Ethical, Psychological, and Other Critical Approaches to the Fantastic.-A Brief Taxonomy of Critical Approaches to Le Guin.- The “Way” to Read Le Guin?: Earthsea and Daoism.- Fantasy and the Unconscious: Jung and the Nature of the Shadow.-References.- 5 Bringing Women to Roke Knoll: Gender and the Lifelong Evolution of Earthsea.- Introduction: Reimagining Earthsea.-“You need not fear a woman”: The Witch and the Sorceress.- Ennobling Hearth and Home.- References.-6 Conclusion: Le Guin’s Legacies in Fiction and in Scholarship.- The Schools for Wizards: Magical Pedagogy Today.- The Future(s) of Le Guin Studies.-References.

Editorial Reviews

This book, readers can see, takes a different perspective from Miller’s. Plotz and Miller have entirely different ideas on how to describe and define Le Guin’s literary antecedents in fantasy. … Each book takes different parts of what turn out to be the wide implications of what might seem a narrow and specific subject. They are both worthwhile studies.” (Mythlore, Vol. 42 (2), April, 2024)

From the Publisher