Essays on Lewis Carroll

There is a common discussion amongst those interested in literature about the metaphors and allusions in the works of Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll first invented the Alice character in the work Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865. Scholars studying Carroll’s stories, including Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have debated whether or not he was able to weave together abstract notions into a cogent story, or if he simply delivered fractured fairy tales for a 20th Century audience. The truth is that Carroll worked purely within the realm of thte imagination, and although he did occasionally ...

Introduction

William Jordan says, “Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom.” His quote reflects the wisdom and growth that Alice goes through in wonderland. The novel follows the story about a seven-year-old who is bored by her sister’s constant reading of childish stories. Alice is in search of adventure, and one of her exploits leads her to Wonderland, where the adventure begins. The story is about maturity in a world where reasoning does not apply. In wonderland, as it will be discussed, Alice is seen to grow in terms of her thinking about the world. There are specific events that contribute ...

Use one of the following quotes from Northrop Frye's The Educated Imagination to consider how literary criticism can help us unpack a creative text. For example, how can the study of literature help us better understand, think more clearly or feel more sensitively about children or childhood? “Imagination gives us both a better and a worse world than the one we usually live with, and demands that we keep looking steadily at them bothLiterature gives us an experience that stretches us vertically to the heights and depths of what the human mind can conceive, to what corresponds to the conceptions of ...

English

24 May 2011

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the reader is privy to the adventures of the inquisitive Alice as she tumbles down the rabbit hole and finds herself ensconced in a world of magic, talking animals and vaguely ‘trippy’ happenings. Throughout the novel, there are a number of magical transformations where the characters transition between forms, much like characters do in a number of traditional fairy tales: for example, the pumpkin becomes the carriage in Cinderella; the beast becomes the handsome prince; the wooden puppet becomes a real boy. All of these events happen to represent an underlying message – for ...