By Steven Carroll
Literary Wonderlands
Edited by LAURA MILLER
Literary Wonderlands. Edited by Laura Miller.
HARDIE GRANT, $34.99
They might be called "wonderlands", but you wouldn't want to go to a lot of them: Kafka's castle for a start, or Dante's hell. In a sense this beautifully produced and illustrated volume is a thematically linked history of, mainly, Western literature.
There are around a hundred "lands", introduced by a wide range of contributors who give us the background to the tales, potted author biographies, the sources of the tales and plot summaries.
Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island was written after fleeing the smog of Edinburgh, Long John Silver was based on an old friend. From Peter Pan's Kensington Gardens and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to less familiar creations such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (a women only country that three male explorers stumble on), the sweep is impressive. Great Christmas present for the literary minded.