Literary Precedents for The Marvelous Land of Oz

The Marvelous Land of Oz Literary Precedents

As indicated above, The Marvelous Land of Oz might fit into so many genres and subgenres that specifying its literary precedents seems almost superfluous. Baum apparently drew his materials from a wide variety of sources (the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, to suggest only two), but in the final analysis the Oz books' American "slant" or "feel" in addition to their heterogeneity of content makes them unique. A very prolific writer, Baum wrote several non-Oz fantasy tales before the present work, for example Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901) and The Enchanted Island of Yew (1903).