Michael Patrick Hearn
Auteur de The Annotated Wizard of Oz
A propos de l'auteur
Michael Patrick Hearn's first Oz annotation, written when he was 21, was featured on the front page of the "New York Times Book Review." He lives in New York City. (Bowker Author Biography)
Œuvres de Michael Patrick Hearn
Oeuvres associées
The Annotated Huckleberry Finn (1988) — Directeur de publication; Introduction; Anmerkungen — 323 exemplaires
Illustrated Works of Mark Twain (1979) — Directeur de publication, quelques éditions — 60 exemplaires
The Art of Oz: Witches, Wizards, and Wonders Beyond the Yellow Brick Road (2021) — Postface — 10 exemplaires
Cricket Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 6, February 1977 — Contributeur — 2 exemplaires
The Light Princess: Abridged [sound recording] — Abridger — 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Hearn, Michael Patrick
- Date de naissance
- 1950-04-24
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- USA
- Professions
- literary scholar
Membres
Critiques
Listes
All Things Oz (1)
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 13
- Aussi par
- 12
- Membres
- 1,940
- Popularité
- #13,261
- Évaluation
- 4.3
- Critiques
- 29
- ISBN
- 30
- Langues
- 2
Michael Patrick Hearn's The Annotated Christmas Carol goes a long way toward helping people like me put the story, and both its positive and negative aspects, in full context. This is the kind of "layman's acadame" volume that fulfills a desperately needed function: it treats the lay reader as smart and intelligent, and pulls together a lot of different historical and biographical strands that will help them understand a culturally meaningful work that probably only saw through the lens of entertainment. it's not a deep-dive or a truly academic text, but it points the way toward those deeper, denser materials if the reader chooses to go on and take the next step. If not, it at least leaves them with a more informed appreciation.
The one caveat here is that Hearn's perspective, and presumed audience, is distinctly American. That shouldn't come as a surprise, but it might - I was a little bit thrown how often he uses annotations to explain old British currency, or tell us where in London we might find a certain location. (It must be said, though, that this is a twenty-year-old book, and the internet has globalized a lot more day-to-day cultural information in the intervening years.) More intriguing is his repeated emphasis on Dickens' disastrous social standing in the United States preceding Christmas Carol, thanks mostly to criticisms he published following a visit. I'd never heard anything about this aspect to the failure of Martin Chuzzlewit and Dickens' need for a big hit, but it makes sense and Hearn provides solid grounding. I just don't think a British author, writing for a British audience, would have given it so much air. That's not a criticism - just an observation.
While the annotations are often very interesting, explaining words and phrases that have fallen out of fashion, making comparisons to Dickens' own life, and describing how some sequences were revised before publication or transformed by early stage adaptations, the "stars" of the book are the introduction and two appendices. The extensive introduction chronicles the development of A Christmas Carol (including the failure of Chuzzlewit), its publication, and its critical reception. It also fully describes his despair at the treatment of the poor, especially children, which largely sparked the creation of Christmas Carol and goes some way toward contextualizing the problematic Tiny Tim. The first appendix acts as a book-end, covering Dickens' decision to tour with Public Readings of Christmas Carol, taking us from his separation from his wife to the health issues he developed on the road and resultant early death. Together these two sections take up more than 100 pages of the book and are excellent, engaging reads. The second appendix is more of a curio - the full text of Dickens' reduced-length Christmas Carol utilized for the Public Readings - but a valuable inclusion nonetheless. The book is completed with an extensive bibliography of and on Dickens.
This is an excellent volume for anyone who has ever read A Christmas Carol, or even grown up watching one of the innumerable adaptations, and wants to better understand it. My only thought toward a reprint would be a chapter to overview film and TV adaptations, and their trends, especially as in the last 30 years we have moved much more fully away from "heritage" (text-authentic) productions to ones that reframe or modernize the story. Otherwise - this is an ideal "next step" for a personal library, and it would actually make an excellent Christmas gift in and of itself.… (plus d'informations)