The Wizard of Oz: The Shaping of an Imaginary World, and: Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum (review)

Suzanne Rahn. The Wizard of Oz: Shaping an Imaginary World. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Michael O. Riley. Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy Worlds of L. Frank Baum. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1997.

Traditionally, volumes of literary criticism treating L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its sequels have been scarce (perhaps due to Baum's dubious reputation among some critics), although two recent books, Michael O. Riley's Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum (UP of Kansas, 1997) and Suzanne Rahn's The Wizard of Oz: Shaping an Imaginary World (Twayne, 1998), suggest that may be changing. Critical editions of Wizard and the other Oz books have also been, until recently, in short supply. For example, Martin Gardner and Russell Nye's once groundbreaking critical edition, The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (1957), reprinted and slightly revised in 1994 by Michigan State University Press, is largely outdated, while Michael Patrick Hearn's "Critical Heritage" edition (Schocken, 1983) is out of print. William R. Leach's edition of the novel for the American Society and Culture Series (Wadsworth, 1991) is fairly narrow in its cultural studies approach to the novel, which is better developed in Leach's discussion of Baum in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (Pantheon, 1993). The Oxford World's classic edition (1997), edited by Susan Wolstenholme, and Jack Zipes' The Wonderful World of Oz (which includes the complete texts of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Emerald City of Oz, and Glinda of Oz) give students and teachers more choice in selecting critical editions of Baum's work. Ultimately, reaction to these new critical volumes depends largely on one's expectations.

Perhaps the most eagerly-awaited and publicized of these books is Michael O. Riley's Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, which has been billed as the first comprehensive look at all of Baum's fantasies, including non-Ozian books such as The Master Key (1901), The Enchanted Isle of Yew (1903), and John Dough and the Cherub (1906). Riley bases his examination of Baum's fantasy worlds on the assumption that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the "quintessential American fairy tale" and is worthy of further examination because of its effective creation of an "Other-World," an idea first suggested by C. Warren Hollister in his 1971 article, "Oz and the Fifth Criterion"(3). Riley, a long-time Oz fan, claims to "rediscover Baum's original Other-world" by tracing its development in his many books.

For those searching for a groundbreaking critical look at Baum's fantasies, Oz and Beyond might be somewhat problematic, at least partly because of its narrow focus. Since Riley is preoccupied with Baum's creation of a new sort of American fairy tale, he occasionally makes assumptions that may seem questionable. For example, while praising Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), a work that has sometimes been hailed as Baum's best non-Oz fantasy, he argues that, because its subject matter is not strictly "American," it "represents a step backward and a retreat for Baum" (95). Similarly, Riley criticizes one of Baum's more interesting stories, John Dough and the Cherub, primarily because its setting is not developed. Perhaps more importantly, Oz and Beyond assumes that the reader is already friendly to Baum by ignoring some of the controversies surrounding his books.

As a very general introduction to Baum's fantasy worlds, however, the book can be useful. After a brief biographical introduction, Riley examines Baum's major fantasies, one-by-one, in mostly chronological order, expanding his discussion beyond just the Oz books to look at such Baumian fantasy-lands as Ix, Mo, Merryland, and Burzee. For the most part...