Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Ray Bradbury (2000) (168p) [Inua].pdf

Title: Ray Bradbury (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Editor: Harold Bloom
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 159 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Publications; Second Edition edition (January 31, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791059146
ISBN-13: 978-0791059142

Description:
Students faced with the daunting prospect of a literary research paper will surely applaud the arrival of this book. It provides scholarly insight into and critical analysis of Bradbury's major themes. Although the essays were originally written for an adult audience, most will be accessible to teens. Each chapter was written by a different author and can stand alone. Together they treat Bradbury's invasion stories and Mars stories, his use of the Gothic tradition and the frontier myth, his Cold War novels, the role of children in his works, and there is a discussion of "The Golden Apples of the Sun." There is also an essay by Bradbury on the rebirth of imagination. Those students who are not quite ready for sophisticated critical analysis may want to start with Robin Anne Reid's Ray Bradbury (Greenwood, 2000). Both books should be in libraries whose patrons take science fiction-and Bradbury-seriously.

From Harold Bloom's Modern Critical Views series, this book collects critical essays discussing one of America's most unique storytellers, sci-fi/fantasy writer Ray Bradbury. Although one applauds Bloom's acumen in choosing Bradbury as a subject worthy of elucidation, the actual essays selected are really rather disappointing. Perhaps the fault lies not with the editor (whose bona fides are so widely recognized), but with a general dearth of meritorious criticism regarding an author who works principally in the literary ghetto that is known as 'genre' fiction. Most of the scholars represented here have picked up some specific quality that seems noteworthy in a few of his works, and have explicated this quality in some detail, but none seem able to view the man's work as a whole, or evaluate its overall import. Perhaps closest is William F. Touponce's cryptic essay "The Existential Fabulous: A Reading of Ray Bradbury's 'The Golden Apples of the Sun'", but his 'oneiric' approach is aimed at the serious scholar, not the casual reader. More commonplace are Diskin's "Bradbury on Children", and Hazel Pierce's "Ray Bradbury and the Gothic Tradition", with emphasis on the horror genre, and the pieces by Wayne Johnson and Gary Wolfe, which focus more on the famous sci-fi collection The Martian Chronicles. It is typical of the narrow focus of this volume that only Kevin Hoskinson's fascinating political study "Ray Bradbury's Cold War Novels" does more than mention the master's finest novel, Fahrenheit 451. This reviewer would much rather have seen some in-depth analysis of Bradbury's style (which is surely one of his strong points), and more attention given to his many short stories, which are certainly superior to most of his novels. Inquisitive readers who come to this book wondering why this fine, but often overlooked writer is deemed worthy of criticism at all will come away knowing little more than they came in with.