John Lennard, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction

A volume of essays exploring some of the best genre fiction of the last 40 years.

Contents

Seven new essays.
1. Of Serial Readers: Living with Genre Fiction. On serial reading in relation to books about serial killing, including Reginald Hill's A Killing Kindness and Deadheads, written under the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Thomas Harris's Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs.
2. Of Purgatory and Yorkshire: Dorothy L. Sayers and Reginald Hill's Divine Comedy.
3. Of Pseudonyms and Sentiment: Nora Roberts, J. D. Robb, and the Imperative Mood. Roberts has been since 2000 the world's best-selling novelist.
4. Of Modern Dragons: Antiquity, Modernity, and the Descendants of Smaug. On the fiery, destructive, wise, and talkative dragons created by J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, and others.
5. Of Aliens in Africa: Ian McDonald and the War of the Heart of Chaganess. McDonald's indictment of First-World responses to the African AIDS crisis.
6. Of Organelles: Octavia E. Butler's Strange Determination. Butler's Xenogenesis trology is a fierce critique of religious essentialism and genetic determinism.
7. Of Stormwings and Valiant Women: The Tortallan World of Tamora Pierce. Pierce has created a remarkable world with even more remarkable inhabitants--especially Stormwings, steel-clawed and -winged humans, who drink fear and defile the battlefield dead

NOTE: essays 5, 6 and 7 appear in shorter form in the Genre Fiction Sightlines on Chaga, Xenogenesis, and The Immortals.

John Lennard

John Lennard has taught English Literature in Cambridge and elsewhere for years, and is presently Professor of British and American Literature at UWI--Mona. His other publications include But I Digress (Clarendon, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (OUP, 1996; 2/e 2005), The Drama Handbook (with Mary Luckhurst, OUP, 2002), the Literature Insights Hamlet (HEB, 2007), and Genre Fiction Sightlines on Octavia Butler, Reginald Hill, Ian McDonald, Walter Mosley, and Tamora Pierce (all HEB, 2007). He is General Editor of the HEB Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series.

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