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.
With verve and imagination, Witten and Morgenstern have brought together an eclectic and stimulating new set of essays on Carroll's modernist afterlives. Who could resist a tea-party (or should that be a caucus race?) at which such "older children" - Joyce and Flann O'Brien, Woolf and Kate Chopin, Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers, Walter Benjamin and Auden, Borges, Marquez, and Nabokov, Plath and Elizabeth Bishop - are gathered? When James Joyce called Jung and Freud Tweedledum and Tweedledee, he was proving Carroll's immense capacity for explaining the modern world. The essays in this collection confirm this over and over again. They expel the idea that Modernism was a rejection of Victorian culture; that Carroll's Alice books could be perceived as peripheral to the development of 20th Century Literature. And they affirm that modernist writers drew on Carroll because he revealed how threatening the regimes of reason, knowledge, and social ritual could be; and because he showed ways of contesting those regimes. There's glory for you.
