Lore, Myth and Meaning - for Post-Moderns: An Introduction to the Story World of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Sequence

A distinctive phenomenon and one highly characteristic of the genre of fantasy literature from the latter half of the twentieth century, has been the writing of sprawling 'history rich' and philosophically complex series that span a large number of volumes teeming with both folkloric and other traditional narrative materials. Perhaps it is because of the sheer size of such works that, to date, a writer such as the American Robert Jordan, (b.1948) and his widely acclaimed ongoing fantasy series 'The Wheel of Time', have attracted only a limited amount of close scrutiny, let alone close philosophical analysis. With some 15 million books in print in North America alone and translations currently in 24 languages, by 2003, and in little more than a decade, he has obviously attracted enormous global appeal. And although his sequence of panoramic volumes is not without stylistic flaw, as was noted by Clute and Grant in their respected 'Encyclopedia of Fantasy', yet 'when complete the sequence will almost certainly constitute one of the major epic narratives of modern fantasy', and, one might suggest, a popular search for accessible meaning in 'history'.