Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

Rochelle (English, Mary Washington College, Fredericksburg, VA) argues that Le Guin, by revisioning and reshaping myth in her fantastical stories, subverts myth itself--particularly the myth of the Hero and the Quest and the myth of utopia--as a way of making her case for the importance of feminist and Native American solutions to modern ways of making meaning. Rochelle's study of Le Guin's Earthsea cycle, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and other works places her rhetoric alongside that of Emerson, Thoreau, C.S. Peirce, and John Dewey as a romantic/pragmatic rhetoric that argues for the value of the subjective, the personal, the private, the small, and the feminine. Distributed by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.