Princeton Public Library

Literary wonderlands, a journey through the greatest fictional worlds ever created, general editor, Laura Miller

eng

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Literary wonderlands

943689406

general editor, Laura Miller

a journey through the greatest fictional worlds ever created

From the epic of Gilgamesh, almost two thousand years BCE, to the modern fantasies of Stephen King's Dark Tower series and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, authors have created fictional realms that have captivated audiences. Miller has guided a team of writers to unlock the mysteries and meanings of nearly 100 fantastical and awe-inspiring lands. The essays explore the contemporary events and circumstances that influenced each work, and examine how elements of the author's life were relevant to the creation of the story

Introduction -- Ancient myth & legend. Anonymous : The epic of Gilgamesh, c.1750 BCE -- Homer : The odyssey, c.725-675BCE -- Ovid : Metamorphoses, c.8 -- Anonymous : Beowulf, c.700-1100 -- Anonymous : The thousand and one nights, c.700-947 -- Anonymous : The mabinogion, 12th-14th century -- Snorri Sturluson : The prose Edda, c.1220 -- Dante Alighieri : The divine comedy, c.1308-21 -- Thomas Malory : Le morte d'Arthur, 1485 -- Ludovico Ariosto : Orlando Furioso, c.1516/32 -- Thomas More : Utopia, 1516 -- Edmund Spenser : The faerie queene, 1590-1609 -- Wu Cheng'en : Journey to the west (Xiyouji), c.1592 -- Tommaso Campanella : The city of the sun, 1602 -- Miguel de Cervantes : Don Quixote, 1605/15 -- William Shakespeare : The tempest, 1611 -- Cyrano de Bergerac : A voyage to the moon, 1657 -- Margaret Cavendish : The description of a new world, called the Blazing-World, 1666 -- Science & romanticism. Jonathan Swift : Gulliver's travels -- Ludvig Holberg : The journey of Niels Klim to the world underground, 1741 -- Charles Kingsley : The water-babies : a fairy tale for a land baby, 1863 -- Lewis Carroll : Alice's adventures in Wonderland, 1865 -- Jules Verne : Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, 1870 -- Samuel Butler : Erewhon, 1872 -- Richard Wagner : The ring of the Nibelung, 1876 -- Robert Louis Stevenson : Treasure island, 1883 -- Edwin A. Abbott : Flatland : a romance of many dimensions, 1884 -- Edward Bellamy : Looking backward : 2000-1887, 1888 -- Mark Twain : A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889 -- H.G. Wells : The time machine, 1895 -- L. Frank Baum : The wonderful wizard of Oz, 1900 -- Golden age of fantasy. J.M. Barrie : Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906 -- Arthur Conan Doyle : The lost world, 1912 -- Edgar Rice Burroughs : At the earth's core, 1914 -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman : Herland, 1915 -- Cecilia May Gibbs : Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie : their adventures wonderful, 1918 -- Yevgeny Zamyatin : We, 1924 -- Frank Kafka : The castle, 1926 -- H.P. Lovecraft : The Cthulhu mythos, 1928-37 -- Aldous Huxley : Brave new world, 1932 -- Robert E. Howard : Conan the Barbarian, 1932-36 -- Vlladimir Bartol : Alamut, 1938 -- Jorge Luis Borges : Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, 1941 -- Austin Tappan Wright : Islandia, 1942 -- Antoine de Saint-Exuéry : The little prince, 1943 -- Tove Jansson : The Moomins and the great flood, 1945 -- New world order. Mervyn Peake : Gormenghast, 1946-59 -- George Orwell : Nineteen eighty-four, 1949 -- C.S. Lewis : The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950-56 -- Isaac Asimov : I, Robot, 1950 -- Ray Bradbury : Fahrenheit 451, 1953 -- J.R.R. Tolkien : The lord of the rings, 1954-55 -- Juan Rulfo : Pedro Páramo, 1955 -- Stanisław Lem : Solaris, 1961 -- Anthony Burgess : A clockwork orange, 1962 -- Vladimir Nabokov : Pale fire, 1962 -- Pierre Boulle : Planet of the apes, 1963 -- Gabriel García Márquez : One hundred years of solitude, 1967 -- Ursula K. Le Guin : A wizard of Earthsea, 1968 -- Philip K. Dick : Do androids dream of electric sheep?, 1968 -- Peter S. Beagle : The last unicorn, 1968 -- Kurt Vonnegut : Slaughterhouse-five, 1969 -- Larry Niven : Ringworld, 1970 -- Italo Calvino : Invisible cities, 1972 -- William Goldman : The princess bride, 1973 -- Samuel R. Delany : Dhalgraen, 1975 -- Georges Perec : W or the memory of childhood, 1975 -- Gerd Mjøen Brantenberg : Egalia's daughters : a satire of the sexes, 1977 -- Angela Carter : The bloody chamber and other stories, 1979 -- Octavia E. Butler : Kindred, 1979 -- Douglas Adams : The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, 1979 -- The computer age. Stephen King : The dark tower series, 1982-2012 -- Terry Pratchett : The Discworld series, 1983-2015 -- William Gibson : Neuromancer, 1984 -- Margaret Atwood : The handmaid's tale, 1985 -- Iain M. Banks : The culture series, 1987-2012 -- Bernardo Atxaga : Obabakoak, 1988 -- Neil Gaiman et al. : The sandman, 1988-2015 -- Neal Stephenson : Snow crash, 1992 -- Lois Lowry : The giver, 1993 -- Philip Pullman : His dark materials, 1995-2000 -- George R.R. Martin : A game of thrones, 1996 -- David Foster Wallace : Infinite jest, 1996 -- J.K. Rowling : Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone, 1997 -- China Miéville : The Bas-lag cycle, 2000-04 -- Jasper Fforde : The Eyre affair, 2001 -- Cornelia Funke : Inkheart, 2003 -- Susanna Clarke : Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, 2004 -- David Mitchell : Cloud Atlas, 2004 -- Kazuo Ishiguro : Never let me go, 2005 -- Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o : Wizard of the Crow, 2006 -- Michael Chabon : The Yiddish Policemen's Union, 2007 -- Suzanne Collins : The hunger games, 2008 -- Haruki Murakami : IQ84, 2009-10 -- Wu Ming-Yi : The man with the compound eyes, 2011 -- Ann Leckie : The imperial Radch trilogy, 2013-15 -- Nnedi Okorafor : Lagoon, 2014 -- Salman Rushdie : Two years eight months and twenty-eight nights, 2015