"The Annotated Wizard of Oz"

[fiefoe]

What I don't like about this book is all the repetition. Dorothy and her three companions are always going into the Wizard's room one by one. Very inefficient way of doing things.

From the annotations:

• "One of Baum's major contributions to the tradition of the fantasy tale," explained Nye in The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was, "is his recognition of the inherent wonder of the machine,... By transforming the talking beasts of ancient folk tales into talking machines, Baum grafted twentieth century technology to the fairy tale tradition."
• "Love, as depicted in literature," (Baum) said..., "is a threadbare and unsatisfactory topic which children can comprehend neither in its esoteric nor exoteric meaning. Therefore it has no place in their storybooks." (John Ruskin had much the same opinion, writing... that the word "love," "in the modern child-story, is too often restrained and darkened into the hieroglyph of an evil mystery, troubling the sweet peace of youth with premature gleams of uncomprehended passion, and flitting shadows of unrecognized sin."
• Several readers have compared the reconstruction of the Tin Woodman's body with Plutarch's parable of the Ship of Theseus.
• Meyer Levin noticed odd similarities between "Oz" and "one of the most abstract philosophic novels of modern times," Franz Kafka's The Castle (1926).
• The Emerald City may have in part been inspired by the White City,... It had special significance for both Baum and Denslow: The fair brought Baum to Chicago in 1891 and Denslow in 1893.
• Katharine Rogers suggested in "Liberation for Little Girls"  that Gayelette is "a female version of Pygmalion, who creates a mate for herself because there isn't a man clever and good enough for her to love.
• (On Glinda's guards:) Female soldiers who tramp through Baum's stories may have had their origin in the Aberdeen Guards, a group of South Dakota women who performed elaborate drills in 1890, dressed in bluejackets and red skirts.
  

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