Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (Suny Series, McGill Studies in the History of Religions, a S)

Over the Rainbow shows how Dorothy's passage from Kansas to Oz and back again recapitulates paradigmatic stories of both America and Christianity. Defining human identity on three symbolic levels (individual, collective, and cosmic), Nathanson shows that The Wizard of Oz has come to be a "secular myth."