Off to See the Wizard Again and Again

Abstract

This paper focuses on L. Frank Baum’s character the Tin Woodman. It considers repetition in children’s series fiction by reading the Oz series through some well-known theorists of repetition and serial production -Walter Benjamin on mechanical reproduction, Sigmund Freud on the uncanny — along with work on the uncanny by Ernst Jentsch and Masahiro Mori. It locates series fiction in relation to other popular forms of the early twentieth century that work through repetition: dime novels and comic strips. These different forms of seriality were widely read and enormously popular. That was their threat. Children’s series fiction during the machine age was also scapegoated as debased because it was popular. For the first sixty years or so of its reception, various social critics, educators, and librarians dismissed the Oz series in particular as cheap, repetitive, perfunctory, too accessible and common. That response arose from a cultural ambivalence throughout the industrialized twentieth century about art in general as increasingly technologically produced and mechanically delivered.