Access Instantly Literary Wonderlands: A Journey Through The Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created Formulated By Laura Miller Shared As Paperbound
Meinung
Dies ist ein opulentes Kompendium fantastischer Welten, das umv, Chr. beginnt und mit dem Werk von Salman Rushdie vonendet,
Hier werdenWerke zusammengefasst vorgestellt, Mal kürzer und mal länger, manches Werk wird in seiner historischen Bedeutung verortet und andere werden durch wunderschöne Bilder oder Karten ergänzt und in Szene gesetzt.
Zu den recht umfangreichen Inhaltszusammenfassungen erfährt man auch einiges über die jeweiligen Autoreinnen einschließlich Foto,
In der Einleitung geht Laura Miller auf die Unterschiedlichkeit der Geschichten und ihrer Welten ein, Alle Länder der Werke sind erfunden, doch nicht alle sind im engeren Sinne fantastisch,
Wer schon immer mal einen Querschnitt fantastischer Werke entdecken wollte, sollte unbedingt mehrere Blicke in dieses Buch wagen, denn neben bekannten Titeln, wie in der Buchbeschreibung bereits genannt, stößt man hier auch auf nicht so sehr bekannte Geschichten, die der Leserschaft schmackhaft gemacht wird.
So habe ich mir zum Beispiel die mir unbekannten Werke “Alamut” von Wladimir Bartol, “Mumins lange Reise” von Tove Jansson und “Herr der Krähen” von Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo auf meiner Merkliste notiert, um sie nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren.
Nicht nur die Auswahl der vorgestellten Bücher ist bemerkenswert, Das ganze Buch wurde mit sehr viel Liebe gestaltet wie auch verarbeitet, Es ist ein fest gebundenes Hardcover in gehobener Qualität und recht festem Papier, das mehrfaches Blättern und Stöbern mit Leichtigkeit aushält, Leider gibt es keine Lesebändchen, Diese hätten das Werk noch zusätzlich verschönert,
Fazit
Leider sind die Inhaltszusammenfassungen nicht immer spoilerfrei, Hier und da wird zu viel verraten, was meine Lesefreude etwas gehemmt hat, Zudem fiel, für mein Gefühl jedenfalls, manche Buchvorstellung ein bisschen zu kurz aus, Da sind meine Erwartungen nicht ganz erfüllt worden, Insgesamt führten meine Kritikpunkte zu einem Stern Abzug,
Im Großen und Ganzen dennoch ein ganz besonderes und wertvolles Buch, das Literatur und Fantasybegeisterte entzücken wird, Unter anderem auch ein schönes Buch für unter den Weihnachtsbaum! Fills a gap we didn't know existed, and still aren't sure, A supposed catalog of the lands of fantasy and science fiction through the ages, Is more like a survey of those fantasy and fiction works through the ages which created worlds or universes,
Over a hundred entries, so the coverage is shallow,
Nice illustrations. A glorious, fullillustrated collection that delves deep into the inception, influences, and literary and historical underpinnings of nearlyof our most beloved fictional realms,
Literary Wonderlands is a thoroughly researched, wonderfully written, and beautifully produced book that spans two thousand years of creative endeavor, From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's Q it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work.
With hundreds of pieces of original artwork, illustration and cartography, as well as a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae" for each work, Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction.
Nice collection of fantasy and science fiction worlds from Gilgamesh until The Hunger Games, As someone who has read maybeof thecovered wonderlands and will very likely never read more than, it was satisfying to get the rough sketches plus a bunch of fun facts.
This book probably actually will cause me to read even fewer fiction novels cause it reduced what little FOMO was left inside my mind,
For example, I didn't know the term utopia was coined by abook of that name, It describes a communist society without private property, in which people have to move houses everyyears so that they don't get ideas of owning their land, In Utopia, nobody starves anymore, but people give up the freedom to travel and of generally doing "useless" things, Almost suspicious how much this seems to mirror the antimodernist critiques, thinking of it,
Or about the movement of Muscular Christianity, when talking aboutth century author and priest Charles Kingsley, From the Wikipedia article: "The criteria are "a mans body is given to him by Godand to be trainedand brought into subjectionand then used for the protection of the weakfor the advancement of all righteous causesand for the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.
"" I really didn't get a cool version of Christianity growing up,
The book made me think about the impact of creating visionary and cautionary tales, The stories humans tell each other seem to have considerable impact on our thinking, of course
often to our detriment, e, g. when people can't help but let their mind jump to concrete but absurd stories like The Terminator or I, Robot when thinking about abstract and complicated topics like AI.
Telling the right stories at the right time might be crucial, If you were a relatively intelligent individual during the last centuries during which stories started to be more scalable, slightly directing the broader public attention towards the lives we might better want to yearn for, or what we should definitely avoid, might be the best shots at improving our collective futures.
One example from the book are the Bellamy Clubs in the US who were inspired by the socialist utopia from Edward Belllamy's"Looking Backward:", People have been immersing themselves in stories for thousands of years, originally these were passed from person to person before someone had the genius idea of writing them down.
What stories though are the defining example of a type Literary Wonderlands tries to do this by picking aroundbooks and series that they think have redefined the literary landscape when they were published.
There are five sections of books, beginning with Ancient Myth amp Legend and then Science and Romanticism it then goes onto the Golden age of Fantasy a New World Order and finishes up in the Computer Age.
There are classics such as The Odyssey and Beowulf and the Tempest, The Time Machine and The Water Babies and it brings pretty much up to date with Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy.
I was pleased to see favourite authors like Sir Terry Pratchett, Iain M, Banks and Neil Gaiman, and titles that I had read and enjoyed like Snow Crash and Neuromancer that I hadn't expected to make it in,
This lavish coffee table book of books has a small biography of the author and there are lots of pictures, artworks and maps from the books covered.
There is a plot overview and for a series or trilogy there is a broader look at the story, but be aware there are frequently spoilers! The main flaw is that as it is very broad in its scope, it misses so many other books that should have been included as defining books of a particular genre but it would have made the book too unwieldy though.
Off to a very good start, Slanted toward SF/F proto in the early days, e, g Beowulf. , Orlando Furioso, Metamorphoses, nice little story capsules and great ART!, Works mentioned extend from GilgameshBC to, Your interest in this book will depend on your interest in the fantastic in literature, And the book capsules range from excellent to pretty murky
Here's the NYT review, which you should read first:
sitelink nytimes. combo
TOC is at Google, with some samples: ttps:sitelinkplay, google. com/books/readeridhSgKD and here's a tip: DO NOT BUY the ebook, as it is textonly, A major part of the charm of the book is the excellent reproductions of the color illustrations from the works, For my full review: sitelink co. uk/
I fell in love with this in the bookshop, I have a great weakness for books about books and leafing through the pages of beautiful illustrations and biographies of fantasy worlds that I had loved over the years, I felt that this was a book that I really needed to have for my own.
Fortunately, it was just before Christmas and Santa Claus in the guise of my parents was very obliging, Tracking back from early mythology all the way through to the modern age, Literary Wonderlands is in the words of its creator Laura Miller is a compendium of the 'lands that exist only in the imagination', offering a panoramic view of the development of storytelling.
Bibliophiles will delight.
Miller emphasises in her introduction that the book is designed to focus on one of the 'least celebrated' aspects of reading 'its ability to make us feel transported to a different time and place'.
Along with a vast team of contributors, Miller has grouped the literary wonderlands by era, going from Ancient Myth and Legend to Science and Romanticism through to the Golden Age of Fantasy and then on to New World Order before finishing up with the Computer Age.
Providing synopses and background information for each of the almost hundred wonderlands featured, we gain valuable context about the influences behind many of the most celebrated works of creative fiction.
Of course, when one actually reads through the wonderlands, one realises that being transported to these places would not be as desirable as all that, From the Hell in Dante's Divine Comedy to the terrifying world of The Water Babies this scarred me as a child to the Gilead of The Handmaid's Tale, all too often the author's wonderland has many of the aspects of a nightmare.
Personally, I have always thought that even Alice's Wonderland is a horrifying story with pretty illustrations, Yet there are others such as the book world of Thursday Next and Moominvalley which have much warmer memories and the wealth of illustrations in this book only serve to remind us of why they captured our imagination in the first place.
Collected together, it becomes possible to see trends in storytelling which go beyond the individual author inspiration, It was striking however that the Ancient Myth and Legend section stretched fromBCE toAD while subsequent sections tended to be a century or so at most, with the Computer Age chapters lasting only the last thirty years.
Additionally, while Miller has examples aplenty for each of her categories, there were a number of notable absentees, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, This was particularly strange given that in the segment on Never Let Me Go, the former novel is hailed as the first piece of true science fiction, Moreover, Literary Wonderlands is centred on mostly Western literature, meaning that a number of works are cited without reference to the nonWestern pieces which inspired them,
More peculiarly, as we move through the sections, there were an increasing number of books which did not seem to be taking place in a wonderland at all, but in worlds strikingly similar to our own.
Does The Handmaid's Tale 'count' as fantasy literature Does speculative fiction transport us to an entirely new time and place Where does the border come between the two
It was odd too how Miller seemed to pick the first novel in a series as the point of focus for a segment without considering its place within its individual canon.
So, the Moomins are represented by The Moomins and the Great Flood even though Literary Wonderlands acknowledges that this book is noncanonical and that most agree that the story's true continuity did not begin until Comet in Moominland.
Similarly, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is featured rather than Peter Pan itself, Because of this, I felt that some of the wonderlands that I loved the best did not quite get their fair coverage,
Tonally, the book is rather disjointed, This is unsurprising given that there are over forty contributors, but it does mean that certain entries are more readable than others, It is not immediately clear who has written about which book, further complicating the issue, That being said, there are some truly fantastic passages, such as the closing lines on The Chronicles of Narnia: 'It isn't the elaboration of the backdrop that casts the spell, that makes the place seem real in spite of its many absurdities, but the inexhaustible delight of the dancers who inhabit it, as well as the man who made it'.
So very, very true. There is a real tenderness too in the descriptions of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Terry Pratchett's Discworld, The one thing I did find a little sad however was how few quotations were made from the original material the pictures and illustrations are stunningly beautiful but it was the words that transported us in the first place.
What intrigued me most however was the realisation that creative ideas recur over time, Egalia's Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes was published inand seems to feature many of the same themes as Naomi Alderman's recent bestseller The Power, I would imagine that this comes from the ongoing frustration of women with our patriarchal society but I was fascinated by how Alderman's novel could be hailed as groundbreaking when another book had achieved success with the same message so comparatively recently.
Indeed, many of the wonderlands do seem to be interrelated, with numerous examples of crosspollination, I wondered, was this because the stories we hear in childhood leave a mark which decides on the ultimate path of our own future imaginings Or are there just a finite number of fresh ideas in the world
While not quite qualifying as encyclopedic, Literary Wonderlands is a feast for the booklover and a wonderful chance to revisit old friends.
I found a number of books to be added to the TBR pile and enjoyed tracing the lines of intertextuality, Despite the impressive credentials of its contributors, this is less an academic piece as it is a joyous recognition of fiction's power to make us visualise the product of someone else's imagination.
While Wonderlands is not without its flaws, I am still smitten with its unabashed enthusiasm for its subject matter and of course, the beauty of the book itself,
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