Wonderland (novel)

Wonderland

First edition cover
Author	Joyce Carol Oates
Language	English
Series	The Wonderland Quartet
Genre	Naturalist novel
Publisher	Vanguard Press
Publication date	1971
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	512 pp
ISBN	0-8129-7655-X
OCLC	70265617
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 22
LC Class	PS3565.A8 W63 2006
Preceded by	them

Wonderland is a 1971 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the fourth in her "Wonderland Quartet" following A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969). It was a finalist for the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction^[1] and it has been called one of the author's best books.^[2][3]

Wonderland follows the character Jesse Vogel from his childhood in the Great Depression to his marriage and career in the late 1960s. Oates later wrote that Jesse is a protagonist who does not have an identity unless he is "deeply involved in meaningful experience", a theme that allowed her to address both what she calls "the phantasmagoria of personality" and the faceless nature of the novelist.^[4]

Oates wrote in a 1992 Afterword that Wonderland among her early novels was "the most bizarre and obsessive" and "the most painful to write".^[4] Oates continued to think about the novel after its completion, and rewrote the ending for the 1972 paperback edition.^[4] She also continued to write about the Vogels: the play Ontological Proof of My Existence is an expansion of Jesse's visit to Toronto in the novel, and she considers the story 'How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again' "an analogue of Shelley [Vogel]'s experience as a runaway to Toledo."^[4]