On Space Opera: The Heart of Genre, Forgotten by Scholars

A few years ago, I taught an upper division literature course on American space opera. There were a couple reasons I chose that angle over many other possible science fiction topics I could have taught: It gave me an excuse to teach Ann Leckie, Tobias S. Buckell, and Star Wars. The course was marked as “American literature,” so I had to stick with U.S.-American writers. I snuck some other stuff in, though. It was a subject that I particularly loved (but, as I discovered, which scholars had largely ignored up to that point). It’s that last piece I will talk about here.