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Winner of the World Fantasy Award, Neil Gaiman´s The Sandman cycle reinvents mythology for the postmodern age. Part of a new wave of graphic novels appearing in the 1980s and 1990s, The Sandman confronted a world in which nothing was certain, the great mythic narratives could no longer be taken for granted, and understanding the human quest for meaning was becoming more important than ever. This book proposes that the cycle is a study in metanarrativity the way we use stories to interpret and direct our lives and the world around us. Leaping into a vast heritage of memes, tropes and storytelling traditions, The Sandman comes out on the other side with a new, heteroglossic approach to making living, valid myths. Gaiman´s work is an epic tale of what we´re looking for and how we find it; and the answers he finds have a lot to tell us about what it means to be human.

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Taryn Skikne, MA. Studied English Literature and Linguistics at Rhodes University and the University of the Witwatersrand. Senior copy editor, Caxton Press, Johannesburg, South Africa.

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