Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom is a collection of scholarly essays examining the work of British author Diana Wynne Jones, whose prolific contributions to speculative fiction span the past thirty years. A contemporary of such well known fantastic authors as Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, Jones is also a clear influence on more recent writers such as J. K. Rowling. Her humorous and exciting stories, many published for children but read by all ages, are also complexly structured and thought provoking. These essays - written by academics and independent scholars from Australia, North America, Europe, and Asia - present a wide variety of approaches to and ideas about Joness work. This book will be of interest to Joness many admirers and to those who study or appreciate speculative fiction and childrens literature.

Contents: Teya Rosenberg: Introduction – Karen Sands-O’Connor: Nowhere To Go, No One To Be: Diana Wynne Jones and the Concepts of Englishness and Self-Image – Maria Nikolajeva: Heterotopia as a Reflection of Postmodern Consciousness in the Works of Diana Wynne Jones – Karina Hill: Dragons and Quantum Foam: Mythic Archetypes and Modern Physics in Selected Works by Diana Wynne Jones – Deborah Kaplan: Diana Wynne Jones and the World-Shaping Power of Language – Charles Butler: Now Here: Where Now? Magic as Metaphor and as Reality in the Writing of Diana Wynne Jones – Sarah Fiona Winters: Good and Evil in the Works of Diana Wynne Jones and J. K. Rowling – Martha P. Hixon: The Importance of Being Nowhere: Narrative Dimensions and Their Interplay in – Akiko Yamazaki: : A Text as a Spellcoat – Sharon M. Scapple: Transformation of Myth in – Donna R. White: Living in Limbo: as a Metaphor for Military Childhood – Alice Mills: The Trials and Tribulations of Two Dogsbodies: A Jungian Reading of Diana Wynne Jones’s – Marilynn S. Olson: Cats and Aliens in the Unreal City: T. S. Eliot, Diana Wynne Jones, and the Urban Experience – Charles Butler: Interview with Diana Wynne Jones.