Making of the Alice Books

by Ronald Reichertz

• ISBN13: 9780773516250
• ISBN10: 0773516255
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1997-10-14
• Publisher: ACP - McGill Queen's University Press

Summary

Analysing Lewis Carroll's Alice books in the context of children's literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, Ronald Reichertz argues that Carroll's striking originality was the result of a fusion of his narrative imagination and formal and thematic features from earlier children's literature. The Making of the Alice Books includes discussions of the didactic and nursery rhyme verse traditionally addressed by Carroll's critics while adding and elaborating connections established within and against the continuum of English-language children's literature. Drawing examples from a wide range of children's literature Reichertz demonstrates that the Alice books are infused with conventions of and allusions to earlier works and identifies precursors of Carroll's upside-down, looking-glass, and dream vision worlds. Key passages from related books are reprinted in the appendices, making available many hard-to-find examples of early children's literature.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Carroll's Uses of ``Literature''	3	(10)
Representative Specific Sources and Analogues	13	(8)
The Battle between Religious, Moral, and Informational Didacticism and Imaginative Literature for Children	21	(12)
``The World Turned Upside Down''	33	(19)
The Looking-Glass Book	52	(9)
Dream Vision: Carroll's Subsuming Form	61	(18)
Appendices	79	(156)
Notes	235	(8)
Works Cited	243	(6)
Index	249