Literary Significance and Criticism
It has been noted that Always Coming Home underscores Le Guin's long-standing anthropological interests. The Valley of Na is modeled on the landscape of California's Napa Valley, where Ursula Le Guin grew up as a child.
Like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American and Taoist themes. It is set in a time so post-apocalyptic that no cultural source can remember the apocalypse, though a few folk tales refer to our time. The only signs of our civilisation that have lasted into their time are artifacts such as styrofoam and a self-manufacturing, self-maintaining, solar-system-wide computer network.
Stone Telling's narrative may be seen as a return to the theme of The Dispossessed and The Eye of the Heron, in which a person from an anarchistic society visits an acquisitive government-ruled society and returns.
Read more about this topic: Always Coming Home
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“... my last work is no sooner on the stands than letters come, suggesting a subject. The grandmothers of strangers are crying from the grave, it seems, for literary recognition; it is bewildering, the number of salty grandfathers, aunts and uncles that languish unappreciated.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)