Alice in Space
eBook - ePub

Alice in Space

The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll

  1. 306 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Alice in Space

The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll

About this book

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll created fantastic worlds that continue to delight and trouble readers of all ages today. Few consider, however, that Carroll conceived his Alice books during the 1860s, a moment of intense intellectual upheaval, as new scientific, linguistic, educational, and mathematical ideas flourished around him and far beyond. Alice in Space reveals the contexts within which the Alice books first lived, bringing back the zest to jokes lost over time and poignancy to hidden references.

Gillian Beer explores Carroll's work through the speculative gaze of Alice, for whom no authority is unquestioned and everything can speak. Parody and Punch, evolutionary debates, philosophical dialogues, educational works for children, math and logic, manners and rituals, dream theory and childhood studies—all fueled the fireworks. While much has been written about Carroll's biography and his influence on children's literature, Beer convincingly shows him at play in the spaces of Victorian cultural and intellectual life, drawing on then-current controversies, reading prodigiously across many fields, and writing on multiple levels to please both children and adults in different ways.

With a welcome combination of learning and lightness, Beer reminds us that Carroll's books are essentially about curiosity, its risks and pleasures. Along the way, Alice in Space shares Alice's exceptional ability to spark curiosity in us, too.

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Yes, you can access Alice in Space by Gillian Beer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Introduction
  7. 1Ā Ā Alice in Time
  8. 2Ā Ā ā€œThe Faculty of Inventionā€: Games, Play, and Maths
  9. 3Ā Ā Puns, Punch, and Parody
  10. 4Ā Ā The Dialogues of Alice: Pretending to Be Two People
  11. 5Ā Ā Are You Animal—Vegetable—or Mineral?: Alice’s Identity
  12. 6Ā Ā ā€œMust a name mean something?ā€ Alice asked doubtfully
  13. 7Ā Ā Dreaming and Justice
  14. 8Ā Ā Growing and Eating
  15. Epilogue
  16. Notes
  17. Selected Bibliography
  18. Index