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Reading Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea

Reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea by Murray Ewing book cover
by Murray Ewing
Series: Invocations
Literary Criticism

Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series is perhaps her most well-known and well-loved work. Throughout its five novels and associated stories, Le Guin developed and deepened her understanding of this magical world through tales of wizards and dragons, the powerful and the powerless, exploring the seductive and dehumanising dangers of power, and the greater wisdom of renunciation.

This monograph is both a personal appreciation of Le Guin’s fantasy series — its depth, its thoughtfulness, and its lightness of touch — and an examination of how its world developed through a series of considered, corrective and exploratory moves, always with a deep reverence for the idea of balance that is so much at the heart of this great writer’s work.

Invocations is a series of short monographs on the works of great fantasy writers.

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