ABSTRACT
It is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives--Graham Greene The luminous books of our childhood will remain the luminous books of our lives.--Joyce Carol Oates Writers, as they often attest, are deeply influenced by their childhood reading. Salman Rushdie, for example, has said that The Wizard of Oz made a writer of me. Twice-Told Tales is a collection of essays on the way the works of adult writers have been influenced by their childhood reading. This fascinating volume includes theoretical essays on Salman Rushdie and the Oz books, Beauty and the Beast retold as Jane Eyre, the childhood reading of Jorge Luis Borges, and the remnants of nursery rhymes in Sylvia Plath's poetry. It is supplemented with a number of brief commentaries on children's books by major creative writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston and Maxine Kumin.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part
Introduction “Points of intersection …”
part 1|8 pages
“To drift in the currents of my unconscious …”
part 2|40 pages
"The place was full of books …”
chapter 2|16 pages
Borges and Georgie
part 3|28 pages
“Wake me up in Wonderland and Whoville and Oz …”
part 4|30 pages
“The essential eternal stories …”
chapter 10|19 pages
“Grains of Truth in the Wildest Fable”
part 5|24 pages
“Whose echoes seem ineradicable …”
chapter 14|16 pages
Higgledy Piggledy, Gobbledygoo
part 6|18 pages
“The luminous symbol of innocence …”
part 7|32 pages
“An impossible idealism …”
chapter 20|24 pages
Mapping the Soupsweet Land
part 8|24 pages
“Recuperated loss …”
part 9|18 pages
“I could become a writer too …”
part 10|6 pages
“To wash up on another island of truth …”