Reading children’s literature in the Anthropocene: the representation of ‘nature’ in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea fiction

Abstract

This article interrogates the relationship between the human and non-human in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea texts. Arguing that children’s literature, and ecocritical treatment of that literature, inherits a vocabulary of ‘nature’ from literary and philosophical Romanticism, it suggests that, as conceived in this discourse, ‘nature’ emerges as a problematic category. Le Guin’s writing is shown to participate in a tradition of children’s literature that engineers a separation between and alienation of the non-human and human, which it then proceeds to negotiate. Offering readings of the dragons and episodes of metamorphosis in Le Guin’s Earthsea texts, I argue that Le Guin’s writing gestures towards a reconciliation of the human and the non-human. This remediation, described as Romantic, is basically ideological and incomplete as the texts ultimately re-inscribe this distinction. Dragons function in the texts as a synecdoche for the entire plenum of non-human animals, serving as a foil against which the human defines itself. ‘Like and unlike men’, the ambiguous animality of the dragons is a site of anxiety in the Earthsea texts and not an opportunity for a Romantic reparation of the human/non-human division. Further, acts of metamorphosis in the Earthsea texts suggest a contiguity of human and non-human. However, I demonstrate that the narrative structure of Le Guin’s texts co-opt and contain the worrying dissolution of the human/nature boundary. The ‘Anthropocene’, a term coined to designate the new, human-dominated geological epoch we now inhabit, is invoked to work through the tension which animates Le Guin’s writing. This concept is used to exert pressure on received methodologies of reading ‘nature’ in children’s literature and in Le Guin’s own critical work.