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“We Cooperate, or We Die”: Sustainable Coexistence in Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

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Abstract

This article examines Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice as a modern example of environmentally informed social dreaming about sustainable coexistence. In our increasingly ecologically-conscious world sustainability and coexistence have become key words in the discourse about social, economic and political relations. The problem of relating to what lies beyond the human, however, remains a challenge. This article argues that this problem is central to Pratchett’s novel, making it a serious commentary on ecoliteracy and ecodesign. The Amazing Maurice, it is claimed, is a work with a transformative purpose. It suggests that cooperation and coexistence are workable beyond what we assume to be their limits.

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Notes

  1. For an overview of Pratchett’s children’s fiction see Baldry (2004).

  2. The commitment to dialogue as a means for strengthening human welfare on a local and global scale, as well as the possibilities for dialogue that globalization has brought, is pursued in William Sullivan and Will Kymlicka (2007).

  3. In this sense, The Amazing Maurice continues the tradition of fantasies such as C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy or Philip Pullman’s The Scarecrow and His Servant.

References

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Correspondence to Marek Oziewicz.

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Marek Oziewicz is Professor of Literature and Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. A. Fulbrighter (2005) and Kosciuszko Scholar (2006), he teaches courses on fantasy and mythopoeia. He has published articles and edited collections on fantasy and YA fiction. His recent book is One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Orson Scott Card (Oziewicz, 2008).

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Oziewicz, M. “We Cooperate, or We Die”: Sustainable Coexistence in Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents . Child Lit Educ 40, 85–94 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-008-9079-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-008-9079-3

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