Pretend for a moment when Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, he decided that instead of placing Alice in a magical land inhabiting schedule driven rabbits, grinning cats, and beheading monarchs, he would now have her visit a place where she never had to grow up: "Neverland." Or maybe George Orwell used a democratic nation as his setting for 1984. Perhaps even the author of Cinderella established our ash covered, yet beautiful, leading lady in 1920's New York City. If these writers had used these new setting adjustments, each story would have changed dramatically; Alice would not have learned how to adapt to a strange and new world much like the adult world she was entering, the allegory of communist societies would not have been present in 1984, and Cinderella almost certainly would have chosen to begin a career instead of marry.

Many readers tend to overlook setting and...