Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults (Children's Literature and Culture)

Description

A prolific and multifaceted author, Ursula K. Le Guin has been writing across multiple genres for more than thirty years, crafting noteworthy and award-winning works of science fiction, fantasy, realism, children’s literature, and nonfiction for readers young and old alike. She has won several Hugo and Nebula Awards for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for children’s literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, and her celebrated Earthsea series has been compared to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre, Mike Cadden explores the full breadth of her work, reading her books for children and young adults alongside her books for adults to find points of connection in her many border crossings. This volume illuminates Le Guin’s lines of vision—not so much the lines that divide, but those that connect her work. Cadden argues that rather than crossing to avoid critical pursuers, or merely to try out a new type of fiction, Le Guin traces lines of thought and follows lines of vision that simply employ the different metaphors that different genres offer. This book concludes with an extensive interview with Le Guin, in which she discusses her work as a crossover writer—or writer for multiple audiences—as well as her writing practices and the genesis of some of her work. This book is essential reading for Le Guin’s many fans, and will be of great interest to all students and scholars of fantasy and children's literature. Mike Cadden is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Western State College. He has published numerous articles on Ursula K. Le Guin and children’s literature.