In the following essay, Armbruster considers the state of ecofeminist literary criticism and offers a poststructuralist ecofeminist reading of Le Guin's “Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come out Tonight.”

In the following essay, Tschachler regards the four novellas of Four Ways to Forgiveness as statements on the evolution in American literature toward reconsideration of American values and conditions.

In the following essay, Helford examines Le Guin's “Buffalo Gals Won't You Come out Tonight,” finding it a “highly problematic cultural text, embedded in Anglo-Native American struggles over language, meaning, and culture; rich in the contradictions of the white, mainstream worldview through which it was written.”

In the following essay, Barr cites the apparent strategies for marketing Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand as “mainstream literature,” and asserts that the book “explores new directions for feminist science fiction which point the way toward ending the sharp distinction between denigrated feminist science fiction and exalted mainstream literature.”

In the following essay, Byrne argues that Le Guin's “recent Science Fiction and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Share important assumptions about truth, story, and how history is made.”

In the following essay, Collins discusses Le Guin's “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a piece of sociopolitical fiction, and asks why this and other such stories have not succeeded in transforming the American conscience.

In terms of quality alone, it is difficult to speak of development in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Her writing has been good from the start. She has published short stories of high quality, selectively, over a period of thirteen years. Since 1966, she has written nine novels. Even the worst of these, The Lathe of Heaven is imaginative and ambitious, far superior to most SF being produced today. There is little doubt that Le Guin is one of the best writers currently working in the science fiction and fa...

In the following excerpt, Reid investigates Le Guin's political concerns as evinced in her short story collections with an eye to her political concerns.

The differences in narrative setting which separate Le Guin's fantasy and her science fiction are tangential. Happy endings are unrealistic and produce comedy like "April in Paris" and fantasy like the Earthsea trilogy. The exile or death of the hero, which is realistic, is the basis of tragedy and of the pressure toward verisimilitude that makes science fiction like "The Masters" or [The Left Hand of Darkness] seem realistic even though the narratives are governed by far-...

The typical Le Guin hero is a visitor to a world other than his own; sometimes he is a professional anthropologist; sometimes the role is forced on him; in all cases he is a creature of divided allegiance. As a student of an alien society, he has responsibilities to his own culture and to the culture he visits; he must sympathize with and participate deeply in both, for it is by the experience and analysis of their differences that he hopes to arrive at a deeper understanding of the nature and possibilities...

Le Guin employs the same pervasive light-and-shadow imagery in both her science fiction and her fantasy; the significance of true names, the touching of hands, and the circle journey are important in both. The nature of evil and the preservation of the Equilibrium are her concern in Earthsea as well as in the Hainish novels. Specific images are repeated almost exactly…. Taoism is a major philosophical influence in both, and both reflect her interest in dreams and deep understanding of anthropology. B...

Repeatedly in [Le Guin's] fiction we confront individuals who are of society and yet not quite a part of it. The outsider, the alien, the marginal man, adopts a vantage point with rather serious existential and philosophical implications. For Le Guin this marginality becomes a metaphor whose potency is fulfilled in a critical assessment of society. (p. 50) The "chronic uprootedness," the disconnectedness, endows the protagonists with a vision that transcends that of the others around th...

In the following excerpt, Reid outlines the plot and major themes of The Word for the World Is Forest and views the volume to be a collection of stories challenging the morality of American involvement in the Vietnam War.

The five stories by Ursula K. Le Guin with which this essay is directly concerned—Rocannon's World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), City of Illusions (1967), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and "The Word for World is Forest" (1972)—are all set in what may be called the Hainish universe, for it was the people of the planet Hain who originally "seeded" all the habitable worlds of this part of the galaxy and thus produced a humanoid universe that is single, exp...

[Le Guin is] perhaps the most successful and critically admired writer ever to produce a substantial body of work within the genre limits of science fiction. In terms of critical recognition, only Vonnegut and Bradbury come close, but Vonnegut's novels were published as literary, not genre, works, and the short stories that made Bradbury famous in the 1940s and 1950s appeared in mass circulation magazines. And neither has won a National Book Award as did Le Guin for juvenile literature…. (p. 5...

Le Guin insists that androgyny is not the main theme of [The Left Hand of Darkness], the main theme being rather that of fidelity and betrayal. But, quite apart from the instantaneous response that the idea of the androgyne evokes in the reader's imagination, there has to be a reason, and a reason that makes good sense in creative terms, for using the androgyne as a term of reference for the discussion of fidelity and betrayal. The androgyne, simply by being presented as existing, looks to the trusti...

Le Guin's books are characterized by a significant use of setting…. [Five of her Hainish stories, Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusion, The Left Hand of Darkness, and "The Word for World is Forest," demonstrate a] significant use to characterize native species on other worlds—a use which has become more complex in successive stories. It goes beyond the more obvious uses of setting to create atmosphere or to draw the reader into an alien environment an...

It is part of the [attractiveness of The Language of the Night] that Le Guin does not presume to present herself as critic; instead she has allowed Susan Wood (whose editing is devoted and very intelligent) to assemble the book from addresses, reviews, introductions and essays written over the past decade. Partly because of this variety and unpretentiousness, partly because of the candor, seriousness and penetration with which Le Guin speaks of her own work, but mainly because of the pleasure of seeing a fi...

The social sciences inform [Ursula K. Le Guin's] fantasies with far more earthy substance than the usual imaginary space-flight, and her hypothetical futures have a strong flavor of familiar history…. ["The Beginning Place"] describes with plenty of moral and psychological complexity the mating of two modern young people; its fantastic terrain … belongs not to any conjecturable future but to that vast, vaguely medieval never-never land whose place in our shared nostalgia w...

[In The Beginning Place] Ursula K. Le Guin has returned to the intrapsychic landscape of her earlier fantasies … and has had her characters reject it as a permanent habitation. Two modern young people, Hugh and Irena, discover a strange, fantastic realm, which Irena calls "the ain countree," and which they enter, are changed by and finally leave behind as they return to the real world. In the essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" … included in The Language of the Nig...

Authors like LeGuin are perpetually being asked to "talk about their work," and since that is tantamount to recounting the cute things your cat did last week, authors respond—as LeGuin largely does [in The Language of the Night]—with criticism. Of these intelligent and novelistically graceful essays, the weakest seem to me those in which the author tiredly repeats the obvious, usually at the prodding of a publisher, and the best of the pieces written spontaneously and affectionat...

Ursula K. Le Guin's Threshold [published in the United States as The Beginning Place] makes its effect by a firm presentation of the world from which fantasy is an escape…. The appeal of Threshold is that the suburban world and its two characters are well realized, more convincingly realized in fact than the world on the other side. The time-warp enables them to make several visits to both, and Hugh and Irena take their characteristics with them into the magical. Hugh retains his plodding sinc...