Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics (review)

Donna R. White. Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1999.

Anyone writing about Ursula Le Guin has to come to terms with the slippery nature of genre categories, as Donna White acknowledges. Le Guin, an award-winning writer in multiple genres and for varied audiences, makes any effort to organize the body of critical approaches to her work an exasperating exercise in typology. White presents us with a useful survey of that criticism with a lively voice as well as with the full recognition of the difficulty of coming to terms with the "balkanized nature of Le Guin scholarship" (5).

The purpose of her book, White explains, is to provide "a generally chronological view of the critical reception of Le Guin's works" (5). The book is conceived to be a continuation of the review of Le Guin's works since Elizabeth Cummins Cogell's Ursula K. Le Guin: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1983). White's volume divides the view of critical reception into four parts: the Earthsea books, the science fiction, the utopias, and the "miscellany of books for children and young adults as well as Le Guin's poetry and her realistic fiction about . . . Orsinia" (5). This last chapter also covers Le Guin's more recent work, including Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1988) and Tehanu (1990). White notes that nine books have been published since Tehanu ; they are, however, too recently published for there to be any substantive body of criticism to review.

The great strength of White's book is the service it provides scholars of Le Guin's work in how it critiques the criticism itself. White's is no simple celebration of the critical record; she is not afraid to provide negative assessments of early and late criticism alongside the laudatory reviews. Her conversational tone throughout is engaging, though it can sometimes cross over to the acrimonious. I envisioned myself sitting across from White at a table over coffee listening to her thoughts about the state of Le Guin's critical reception. I found, too, that she does an expert job of anticipating questions the reader might have, as one does in conversation. On many occasions a question I had regarding one point was answered shortly after.

White also does a great service to children's literature scholars by bringing to our attention the rather surprising deficiency of criticism regarding Le Guin's picture books. Le Guin's nine picture books, dating from Leese Webster in 1979 to Jane On Her Own in 1999, have received remarkably little attention. White shows us that the Earthsea books have had a disproportionate amount of attention and the picture books have garnered almost none. It is as if children's literature scholars--as well as scholars of general fantasy--are only aware of one series by Le Guin. While I disagree with the claim that picture books in general are not the subject of scholarly critique because they are "short, have few words, and the importance of illustrations requires the critic to be trained in both art and literature" (112), White does point out to us our own shortcomings in ignoring an increasingly large portion of the Le Guin corpus. I attribute the shortcoming to our ignorance of their existence rather than to our reticence to engage in picture-book criticism, however.

I also found White's chronological review within each area useful for understanding how critics have often both ignored each other (which she notes often) and have been influenced by each other. She does well to identify the disciplinary focus of the critic in question and offers her own theories for why that critic might be unaware of the body of work in another field. Le Guin's work is a good site for studying the ways different fields operate in ignorance of the work of scholars...