Modernism in Wonderland

Legacies of Lewis Carroll

John D. Morgenstern, Michelle Witen, John D. Morgenstern, Michelle Witen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781350248717
• eBook ISBN: 9781350248731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Retracing the steps of a surprising array of 20th-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll's fictions, this book demonstrates the full extent of Carroll's legacy in literary modernism. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental.

The collection's chapters look beyond literary style to show how Carroll's writings had a far-reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics and philosophy. This book shows us the Alice we recognize from Carroll's novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface to Historicizing Modernism
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Twentieth-Century Wonderlands
• Chapter 2 ‘Speak in French when you ca’n’t think of the English’: Carroll’s French and Mallarmé’s English
• Chapter 3 T. S. Eliot’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Chapter 4 Fantastic Surrealism: The Influence of Lewis Carroll’S Wonderland on Transition Magazine’S American Surrealist Literary Experiments (1927–38)
• Chapter 5 Alice and the Expansion of the American West: Modernism, The Northern Pacific Railroad’S Wonderland Route, and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
• Chapter 6 ‘Open Alice’s Door’: Lewis Carroll’S Influence on Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath
• Chapter 7 Becoming a Child: Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf’S Poetics of Fluidity and Permanence
• Chapter 8 ‘Reeling and Writhing’ in Benjamin’S arcades: the Curious Case of the Girl who Wasn’t There
• Chapter 9 ‘These Tautomeric Changes’: The Figures of Alice and Humpty Dumpty in the Work of W. H. Auden
• Chapter 10 Nightmares of History: Modernism and Colonialism in Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges
• Chapter 11 ‘Sentence First Verdict Afterwards’: Carroll, Nabokov, and the Fragmented Body
• Chapter 12 ‘You’re Nothing but a Pack of Cards!’: Carrollian Intertextuality and the Detective Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers
• Chapter 13 ‘The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’; or, ‘“Alice” on the Stage’
• Chapter 14 Wasting Timelessness: Lewis Carroll, Flann O’Brien, and Modernist Temporality
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint