The Making of the Alice Books

Download or read book The Making of the Alice Books written by Ronald Reichertz and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.