Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader [Paperback]

This new study of the fiction of Gene Wolfe, one of the most influential contemporary American science fiction writers, offers a major reinterpretation of Gene Wolfe’s four-volumeThe Book of the New Sunand its sequelThe Urth of the New Sun. After exposing the concealed story at the heart of Wolfe’s magnum opus, Wright adopts a variety of approaches to establish that Wolfe is the designer of an intricate textual labyrinth intended to extend his thematic preoccupations with subjectivity, the unreliability of memory, the manipulation of individuals by social and political systems, and the psychological potency of myth, faith and symbolism into the reading experience.

Acknowledgements
Preface
A Note on Editions
Abbreviations
PART I: INITIATIONS
1. 'Silhouette': An Introduction to Gene Wolfe
2. 'Trip, Trap': Psychology and Thematic Coherence
3. 'In the House of Gingerbread': Interpretative Games and the Psychology of Reader Response
4. 'The God and His Man': Critical Responses to the Urth Cycle
PART II: INVESTIGATIONS: THE URTH CYCLE
5. 'The Toy Theatre': Uncovering the Story of the Urth Cycle
6. 'The Last Thrilling Wonder Story'? Intergeneric Operations
7. 'How the Whip Came Back': Directing Reader Response
8. 'Cues': The Function of Unfamiliar Diction
9. 'There Are Doors': Memory and Textual Structure
10. 'A Solar Labyrinth': Metafictional Devices and Textual Complexity
PART III: CONCLUSIONS
11. 'The Map': The Multi-volume Novels and Metafictional Cartography
Notes
Bibliography
Index