Commentary
The Emerald City of Oz contains more material on the social organization of Oz than most of the earlier books, and as a consequence has attracted commentary on its Utopian aspects. The "explicitly socialist" economy of Oz has been contrasted to other "fantasy" projections of socialist societies, like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890). How far such analyses and comparisons should be pursued is of course open to debate; as Baum writes of the social structure of Oz in Chapter Three, p. 31, "I do not suppose such an arrangement would be practical with us...."
Gregory Maguire, author of the revisionist Oz novels Wicked and Son of a Witch, has written that The Emerald City of Oz "is suffused with an elegiac quality" and compares its tone with that of The Last Battle, the final volume of C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.
The Forbidden Fountain that Baum introduces to Oz literature in this book recurs in ensuing Oz books, by Baum and by his various successors. The Fountain is an important feature in The Magic of Oz (1919), The Forbidden Fountain of Oz (1980), The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993), and Paradox in Oz (1999).
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“Lonely people keep up a ceaseless flow of commentary on themselves.”
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