Abstract
Ursula K. Le Guin anticipated many of the problems we are now facing and imagined new ways of thinking about them. This collection of studies explores the literary and imaginative, speculative and provisional modes in which she has engaged with ethical questions related to utopia, the power of social change, non-coercive intercultural exchange, and the interconnectedness between readers and writers. By tracing the literary, ecological, philosophical, sexual, postcolonial, and anthropological ramifications of her work, Legacies also takes new approaches to making sense of the “science” of science fiction. In addition to presenting the main themes of the collection, this introductory chapter provides a brief overview of Le Guin’s family background, her cultural and intellectual influences, and the diversity of her oeuvre.
Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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Notes
- 1.
A practice anticipated by Le Guin in the practice of telling life stories in Always Coming Home.
References
Davis, Laurence, and Peter G. Stillman. 2012. Utopian Journeying: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. In Utopian Moments. Reading Utopian Texts, ed. Miguel A. Ramiro Avilés and J.C. Davis, 133–129. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Hymes, Dell. 1964. Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology. New York: Harper and Row.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1979. Introduction to The Word for World is Forest. In The Language of Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood, 149–154. New York: Putnam.
———. 2019. Always Coming Home (Author’s Expanded Edition). Ed. Brian Attebery. New York: The Library of America.
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Robinson, C.L., Bouttier, S., Patoine, PL. (2021). Introduction. In: Robinson, C.L., Bouttier, S., Patoine, PL. (eds) The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_1
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