Ursula K. Le Guin’s "A Wizard of Earthsea"

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. The Boy Wizard and the Young Grand Master

   • Timothy S. Miller

   Pages 1-15

3. Between Children’s Literature and “Adult Fantasy”: The Antecedents and Audiences of A Wizard of Earthsea

   • Timothy S. Miller

   Pages 17-31

4. Fantasy and the Weight of Whiteness: Racial Dynamics in Earthsea

   • Timothy S. Miller

   Pages 33-50

5. Light and Shadow, Good and Evil: Ethical, Psychological, and Other Critical Approaches to the Fantastic

   • Timothy S. Miller

   Pages 51-64

6. Bringing Women to Roke Knoll: Gender and the Lifelong Evolution of Earthsea

   • Timothy S. Miller

   Pages 65-76

7. Conclusion: Le Guin’s Legacies in Fiction and in Scholarship

   • Timothy S. Miller

   Pages 77-84

8. Back Matter

   Pages 85-98

   PDF

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.

• Science Fiction
• Fantasy Fiction
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• Earthsea series
• young adult literature
• literature and race
• Literature, Gender and Sexuality
• Race and Ethnicity

• Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA

  Timothy S. Miller

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

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