Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-first Century - Hardcover

Alice beyond Wonderland both defines the continuing strangeness of the Alice books and offers a surprising and fresh reading of the ongoing 'work' of Carroll's writing on Wonderland in the twenty-first century. This fresh consideration, determined not to repeat the critical tropes of the past, indicates the ways Alice has crossed cultures and literary, political, and technological spaces. Hollingsworth deserves our praise for being so bold a thinker in conceiving this project. - Barry Qualls, author, The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life "Alice beyond Wonderland offers an exciting range of new perspectives on the Alice books, linked around the core theme of space. This impressive collection will make an excellent and original contribution to the literature on Alice and Carroll." - Will Brooker, author, Alice's Adventure: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture

Alice beyond Wonderland explores the ubiquitous power of Lewis Carroll's imagined world. Including work by some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the field of Lewis Carroll studies, all introduced by Karoline Leach's edgy foreword, "Alice beyond Wonderland" considers the literary, imaginative, and cultural influences of Carroll's nineteenth-century story on the high-tech, postindustrial cultural space of the twenty-first century. The scholars in this volume attempt to move beyond the sexually charged permutations of the 'Carroll myth', the image of an introverted man fumbling into literary immortality through his love for a prepubescent Alice. Contributions include an essay comparing Dantean and Carrollian underworlds, one investigating child characters as double agents in untamed lands, one placing Wonderland within the geometrical and algebraic 'fourth dimension', one investigating the visual and verbal interplay of hand imagery, and one exploring the influence of Japanese translations of Alice on the Gothic-Lolita subculture of neo-Victorian enthusiasts. This is a bold, capacious, and challenging work.