Adventures In Wonderland Research Articles

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . By Lewis Carroll. Edited by Richard Kelly. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2011. The Canadian publisher Broadview Press publishes a series of scholarly editions of classic literary works under its Broadview Editions imprint, to which this volume belongs. In addition to reprinting the text of Carroll’s classic, this edition includes a scholarly introduction, a reprinting of Alice’s Adventures Underground, and a wealth of information in the many appendixes. Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Edited by Shelby A. Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine A. Jenkins. New York: Routledge, 2011. The editors of this useful volume successfully bridge the disciplinary divisions that run through much of the scholarship on children’s literature. The volume includes essays by scholars in education, English, and library and information science; these diverse contributors stress the value of taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of children’s literature. The thirty-seven chapters are organized into the following three sections: “The Reader,” “The Book,” and “The World Around.” The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Hold-stock: Critical Essays on the Fiction. Edited by Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Although the recently deceased Robert Holdstock is not known as a children’s author, his fantasy and science fiction novels have long had a following among teenage readers. The eleven contributors to this volume explore the literary roots of Holdstock’s fiction, especially his use of elements from traditional fairy tales and mythology. The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Intended for graduate students and scholars new to the study of children’s literature, this volume consists of previously unpublished essays by some of the leading scholars in the field. The contributors make an [End Page 336] effort to write for readers who are not already specialists in the field of children’s literature studies. However, many of the essays in this volume include research findings and critical insights that would be of interest to well-established scholars. The twenty-six chapters are organized into the following four sections: “Adults and Children’s Literature,” “Pictures and Poetics,” “Reading History/Learning Race and Class,” and “Innocence and Agency.” Treasure Island. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Peter Hunt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Published as part of the Oxford World Classics Series, this new critical edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island features a scholarly introduction by Peter Hunt, in which he discusses the factors that led Stevenson to write this tale. Hunt also provides numerous explanatory notes and three informative appendixes. [End Page 337] Copyright © 2011 Children’s Literature Association

Uncharted Depths: Descent Narratives in English and French Children's Literature

As its title indicates, Uncharted Depths seeks to draw new attention to the complexity and critical importance of nineteenth-century writing for children, and, indeed, to defend children's literature more generally as a serious object of study. It sets about this task through the examination of descent narratives, those fictions of the underground excursion that, explicitly or not, echo the katabatic travels traced in The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and Dante's Inferno. The rich corpus of texts discussed includes Antoine de La Sale's Le Paradis de la reine Sibylle, François de Fénelon's Aventures de Télémaque, William Hayley's The Triumphs of Temper, George Sand's ‘La Fée poussière’, Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la Terre, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin. Beautifully produced by Legenda, the volume includes a welcome quantity of illustrations from these works. Key to the volume's methodology is a consideration of intertextuality as it relates to the perceived hierarchy between adult and children's literature. The book leads forcefully, through its various readings, to a conclusion suggesting that, although there are differences between traditional katabatic narratives and those addressed to younger readers, rarely ‘are these distinctions in line with Genette's pronouncements about children's literature which together depict it as a conservative, inferior form characterized by sanitization and heavy-handed moralization’ (p. 123). To reach this conclusion Vaclavik moves through four compelling chapters on ‘Katabatic Intertextual Relations’, ‘The Underground Landscape and its Inhabitants’, ‘Gender Roles and Relations’, and ‘Didacticism and Diversion’. A particular strength of these chapters lies in the attention given to the precursor texts. The volume's moves through Homer, Virgil, and Dante are very rewarding. The detail of Vaclavik's insights enhances a sense of the complexity of the intertextual links she identifies. Her study of the children's novels is less immediately satisfying, however, perhaps as a result of the survey method used. Rather than look in detail at entire texts, and without always registering their playfulness and enchantment, Vaclavik assesses recurring elements of the narratives. This leads to some innovative conclusions about the role of katabatic narratives in exploring mortality, about their range of conservatism and innovation with relation to gender relations, and about their embrace of didacticism or sheer entertainment. With relation to didacticism, the consideration of these katabatic narratives in their nineteenth-century context, in a world where going underground is newly associated with scientific pursuits such as geology and archaeology, is particularly striking. Yet what these dispassionate analyses lose is any acknowledgement that Vaclavik's reader may herself have read and loved, as a child, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for example, or The Princess and the Goblin. Work championing children's literature, as Vaclavik's does so powerfully, can also perhaps aim towards an understanding of the peculiar appeal of works known affectively through time, works that have acquired value and resonance precisely from their debts, and indeed their depths, remaining undisclosed.

The disfluent discourse: Effects of filled pauses on recall

We investigated the mechanisms by which fillers, such as uh and um, affect memory for discourse. Participants listened to and attempted to recall recorded passages adapted from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The type and location of interruptions were manipulated through digital splicing. In Experiment 1, we tested a processing time account of fillers’ effects. While fillers facilitated recall, coughs matched in duration to the fillers impaired recall, suggesting that fillers’ benefits cannot be attributed to adding processing time. In Experiment 2, fillers’ locations were manipulated based on norming data to be either predictive or non-predictive of upcoming material. Fillers facilitated recall in both cases, inconsistent with an account in which listeners predict upcoming material using past experience with the distribution of fillers. Instead, these results suggest an attentional orienting account in which fillers direct attention to the speech stream but do not always result in specific predictions about upcoming material.

Peter Hunt, ed. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

Today, Carroll’s Alice books are experiencing a renewed success all around the world and many editions have been recently released after Tim Burton’s adaptation. But Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have been successful since they were written respectively in 1865 and in 1872. They have been translated into many different languages, have had an overwhelming influence on both general and children’s literatures and have even been parodied or adapted for a...

The first encounter: Observations on the chronology of encounter with some adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books

The article argues for the necessity of taking into account not only the chronology of adaptation but also the chronology of encounter, using as a starting point an instance of an adaptation student who had seen the 1951 Disney film Alice in Wonderland as a child many times, long before her subsequent encounter with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It considers a selection of adaptations of Carroll’s work, including the 1950 Disney television promotion of its 1951 film and the 1966 Jonathan Miller’s BBC adaptation, to explore the probable consequences of different sequences of encounter.

‘The Queen Had Only One Way of Settling All Difficulties. . . “Off with His Head!”’

This article, on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), reveals the new interpretive possibilities that emerge about this classic fantasy when the character of the Queen of Hearts—along with her murderous mandate ‘Off With their Heads!’—is moved from the background to the forefront of consideration. In a detail that has been overlooked in previous scholarship, state-sanctioned executions were a vivid social reality and the subject of heated public controversy in England during the period when Carroll conceived and composed Alice. Throughout the nineteenth century but especially during the 1860s, the humanity, efficacy and even wisdom of the practice were discussed in popular newspapers, among British citizens, and by elected officials. In this chapter, I make a case that, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll weighed in on this debate. The Queen of Heart’s repeated, impulsive and usually absurd calls for various individuals to be executed satirize this longstanding civic practice and add a new, and previously neglected, area of cultural commentary within the novel: the anti-gallows movement.

Psychotherapy for Depression With Executive Dysfunction

Psychotherapy for Depression With Executive Dysfunction

Disney’s Alice Comedies: A Life of Illusion and the Illusion of Life

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) have inspired various Disney texts, including the studio’s Alice comedies of 1923—27, the films that essentially brought the company into being. This early series helped shape Disney’s development of a film mode, that of hybrid animation, which would pay dividends throughout the studio’s history, and despite their often crude style, forecast the studio’s ongoing efforts at negotiating the relationship between the real and the fantastic, including its development of a ‘house style’ that would become known as the ‘illusion of life’. This article examines these foundational texts particularly in light of their emphasis on a hybrid style — i.e. their combination of live-action and animation — which necessitated a greater awareness of realistic spatial issues, as they invited audiences to enter into a fantasy space, to undertake the same sort of liminal explorations as Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

How to behave as Alice in Wonderland–about boredom and curiosity

In the context of cultural computing, we created a mixed reality environment that influences user affect and evokes predefined user behaviour. The theoretical challenge is applying persuasive design to virtual and augmented reality. Based on begin of the story ‘Alice’s in adventures in Wonderland’ users play the role of the character Alice in a park scene (the first stage out of a total of six). The mixed reality environment ALICE is designed for users to experience the same sequence of emotional and behavioural states as Alice did in her quest through surreal locations and events. This particular study addresses the sequential arousal and interdependencies of two drives: boredom and curiosity. Based on literature, we introduce general design guidelines for arousing boredom and explain how boredom can result in curiosity. We report on the design and redesign of the park environment with the entrance to the rabbit hole. In an experiment effectively arousing boredom can be demonstrated. Based on the experimental results we redesigned the park environment. In a second experiment effectively arousing curiosity was shown so that the particular sequence of events (e.g. appearance of the ‘White rabbit’ robot) had a significant positive influence on the arousal of curiosity and on triggering and guiding intended user behaviour.

Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century (review)

Reviewed by: Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century Zoe Jaques (bio) Hollingsworth, Cristopher , ed. Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 2009. Anyone who teaches Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass will be familiar with students asking, often within the first ten minutes of a seminar, some variation on that enduring question: "Was Dodgson dodgy?" As a result, most tutors find themselves embroiled in discussions about the validity of exploring the text in the light of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's notorious interest in young girls. In these instances, instructors do well to call upon Karoline Leach's observation that "beyond the familiar story of 'little girls,' primness, virginity and reclusive weirdness, [Dodgson's] documented life seems rich, adult, replete with evidence of broad-mindedness, ambiguity and tolerance" (15). Nevertheless, escaping from the pervasive Carroll myth has long been difficult for scholars and students of Alice, not least because of the apparent dualities of Carroll and Dodgson himself. As Cristopher Hollingsworth notes in his introduction, it is appropriate that Leach offers a preface to Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century. Just as Leach sought to challenge traditional views about Carroll, this volume explores what Hollingsworth terms "the Wonderland complex." As he rightly observes, "Whatever was 'in' Carroll's books has been free and busy in the wider world for some time" (xix), and thus the task becomes not to measure Carroll's predilections but to explore the large and abstract cultural system "organized around the 'story space' of Wonderland" (xix). The project of the volume is therefore an ambitious one. The editor recognizes the facts that the Alice books are "ontologically variegated" (xxi) and defy "a singular unifying perspective" (xxii), and that the approach to them must be "bold, inclusive, and experimental" (xxii). The collection is thus divided into three sections on Literature, Image, and Culture—divisions that are not especially bold or experimental, but which seek to examine Carroll's fiction with fresh eyes. The essays are all gathered (in some cases rather loosely) around the topic of space, perhaps anticipating (although not mentioning) Gillian Beer's own Wonderland study, Alice in Space (U of Chicago P, forthcoming). Hollingsworth suggests that the collection is organized "to accord with the opening arc of Alice's Adventures, a defining movement from the mundane to the wonderful that is known to nearly everyone" (xxii). The worrisome implication here is that the first section of the book might accord with the implied mundane start to Alice's journey. Thankfully, Hollingsworth tempers [End Page 364] his statement, suggesting that "[t]hough my 'path to Wonderland' treats narrative literature as old-fashioned, the five texts gathered under this rubric are anything but" (xxiii). Indeed, the Literature section tackles topics ranging from hyperspace philosophy in the Alice books to reading Alice's Adventures and Looking-Glass from the perspective of old age rather than youth. In the opening essay, "Underworld Portmanteaux: Dante's Hell and Carroll's Wonderland in Women's Memoirs of Mental Illness," Rachel Falconer explores how Carroll's Wonderland space is "portmanteau-ed" (using Humpty Dumpty's expression) with the imagery of Dante's Hell in contemporary women's autobiographies. Falconer suggests that the effect of yoking together the underworlds of Carroll and Dante is "to produce a complex underworld space that is at once authorizing and radicalizing, punishing and (potentially) ludic" (3). The essay principally explores these issues in Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998), a text written by a then twenty-three-year-old about her remarkable girlhood, but also draws upon a wider range of autobiographical and semi-fictional memoirs. For Falconer, the hybridization of austere Dantean allusion with the playful child-centered Alice creates a type of écriture feminine in which young women might locate meaning, learn survival, and reflect on their experiences of the metaphorical underworld of mental illness. As in most critical collections, there is some fluctuation in the relevance of the essays, and the second contribution by Christine Roth, "Looking Through the Spyglass: Lewis Carroll, James Barrie, and the Empire of Childhood," offers a somewhat less...

The Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Lewis Carroll

The Photographic Eye and the Vision of Childhood in Lewis Carroll Rosella Mallardi Wait a moment. . . . I am going to interrogate myself.1 —Heraclitus Lewis Carroll’s fame is undoubtedly tied to the centrality of childhood in his works, both in relation to the content of his works and to the modalities of invention and writing: it is this latter aspect that my article intends to investigate. Most illuminating are the special occasions in which he cultivated his friendship with his young friends, and among these his photographic practice is particularly important. As a matter of fact, his “glass-house” becomes a sort of stage where the photographic sitting alternates with his narration of stories invented or reelaborated in that moment for and with his child friends/models.2 This analysis is meant to explore the ways in which the close occurrence between the proceedings of photographic author and portraiture—positive and negative—gave birth to forms of literary contamination by photography, forms really unprecedented and subversive, which contributed to significantly accelerating the renewal of current literary canons and to foreshadowing Modernism and the Avant-garde. In this perspective, Carroll’s letters and diaries offer precious testimony of his interest in photography and of the relation of the infant art not only with the other visual arts but also, and here more relevantly, [End Page 548] with the literary world. Since 1855, the year when he started his photographic practice, Carroll reproduced in poems and short stories the charming, mysterious atmosphere and typical proceedings of the new art. Some years later, his close relationship with his child friends/models on the occasion of more and more refined photographic sittings—“as an amateur-photographer whose special line is children”3—played a prominent role in the definition both of his childhood ideology and his new aesthetics. In the two decades (1860–80) that represented the golden period of photography, Carroll searched and created with children the space for a more concrete and direct interrelationship: the extended period of time needed by the new art process and its novel communicative capacity fueled, more than any other art did, his disposition to experiment with new forms of invention. In fact, it is in the glass-house that childhood inspires his most beautiful pictures and his most original writing. In the 1860s and ’70s Carroll captured the attention of the literary world with the extraordinary writing of the Alice books. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), among other conspicuously disruptive factors, the presence of the body itself and the peculiarly volatile apparitions of Wonderland creatures, as framed by an exclusively subjective vision, are particularly marked. These are factors that undoubtedly recall the photographic eye: in the new art, the sitter’s body, as shot by the eye/I of the artist, is the precondition for image reproduction. In the 1850s, daguerreotypes and photographs were still largely viewed as apparitions rather than as images, which, spectral as they might be, referred back to a body, absent but real and historically recorded.4 For this reason, the daguerreotype was called “the mirror with memory.”5 Also, early photographs, because of the apparatus limits and the long exposure time, uncovered the inner disposition of the sitter’s real body to metamorphosis, deconstruction, and deformity, a condition that highlighted the body’s immersion in time to such a degree that was unique [End Page 549] among previous art forms. In this context, Carroll’s relationship with his child friends/models, which for the first time was being cultivated in the gloomy and mysterious atmosphere of a photographic atelier, now acquired an unprecedented significance in that it nurtured a childhood vision that distanced itself from the idealized, metaphysical, ethical, and didactic approach of Romanticism and at the same time decidedly rejected the image of the “little adult” popularized by Victorian iconography. From the late 1850s to 1885, Carroll’s amateur photography got so refined as to gain him prestige and, more importantly for child portraiture, the complete trust of the children’s parents. In 1878, he claimed that child photography had been his greatest amusement for more than twenty years: “Photography from life—and especially photographing children—has...

Wit та/або гумор

The article analyzes interconnection of the main English terms wit and humour, and proves their untranslatability into French language. Indeed, their traditional French analogues, esprit and humour, do not have similar set of connotations. Thus, the English wit, as used by Hobbes and Locke, denotes some synthetic ability of mind to remark similarity in different things, i.e. fundamentally different from judgment, as, first of all, analytical difference in ideas. Just like the German Witz it denotes knowledge, but a creative and individual one, initiated by the developed abilities, inventiveness etc.; thus, wit is mostly close to ingenium as that of Cicerō and humanists. But these peculiarities of wit inevitably associate it with pleasure which an individual feels if having realized his/her exceptional intellectual faculties, ingenious discussion, play on words (pun), drollery (joke). As for its effect, i.e. pleasure, wit assimilates with good humour. English humour simultaneously embraces the meaning of general temper of mind, “state of heart” a such, “joyful frame of mind” as well as raillery, irony, ridicule and “humour-joke”, and therefore, following the opinion of the author of the paper, may not be adequately reproduced by one and the same French analogue, since the first and the second meaning are more appropriately translated into French by humeur, and the third – by loan translation le humour. References CARROLL Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [Les Aventures d’Alice au pays des merveilles], ed. bilingue angl./fr., trad. fr. M. Merle. – Paris: Librairie generale francaise. – «Le Livre de Poche». – 1990. HOBBES Thomas, Leviathan [1651]. – London: Penguin Books. – 1968. HOBBES Thomas, Leviathan, trad. fr. F. Tricaud. – Paris: Sirey. – 1971. HUME David, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739–1740]. – Oxford: Clarendon Press. – 1978. HUME David, Traite de la nature humaine, trad. fr. J.-P. Clero. – Paris: Flammarion. – «GF». – 1991. JOHNSON Samuel, Dictionary of the English Language. – London: T. Payne et fils. – 1755. LOCKE John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. – Oxford: Oxford UP. – 1975. LOCKE John, Essai sur l’entendement humain, trad. fr. P. Coste, reprint de la 5e ed. (1755), ed. E. Naert. – Paris: Vrin. – 1972. SHAFTESBURY Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times [1711]. – Hildesheim, New York: Georg Olms. – 1978. SHAFTESBURY Anthony Ashley Cooper, Exercices, trad. fr. L. Jaffro. – Paris: Aubier. – 1993.

GWAS Applied to Heart Failure

> “It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.” > > “Alice in Wonderland”, produced by Walt Disney (1951), based on the book by Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Macmillan and Co, London, 1865. Over the last decade, the application of genetics to cardiac risk has transitioned from single gene assessment in rare mendelian disorders to more common complex phenotypes such as ischemic heart disease, atrial fibrillation, and heart failure. This transition has been accelerated by the advances in genomic technology that have made Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) both practical and productive. In any clinical research, study number is power, and nowhere is that more important than GWAS, in which the cost of millions of simultaneous single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) assessments is the need to set the statistical level of significance sufficiently low to avoid false-positives. This need for larger GWAS cohorts has led investigators to develop “networks of networks” to identify novel loci that are ultimately reproducible and truly important to cardiovascular risk and/or outcomes. In this issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, the CHARGE investigators have used such a strategy and present meta-analyses of 4 community-based cohorts to evaluate genomic heart failure risk1 and heart failure mortality2 in nearly 24 000 subjects. Their findings demonstrate both the promise and the challenges of applying GWAS to heart failure. Articles see p 248 and 256 Patients with similar myocardial insults progress to the heart failure syndrome at markedly variable rates and degrees, and in the modern era it is clear that a significant portion of this clinical heterogeneity is genetically based. Indeed, analysis from multigenerational cohorts from the Framingham study has estimated that 28% of the risk of heart failure caused by systolic dysfunction can be attributed to genetic factors.3 Given the well-described pathways of …

The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature (review)

Reviewed by: The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature Dorothy G. Clark (bio) Susina, Jan . The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. As I was traveling cross-country in early 2010, the seventeen-year-old sitting next to me in our overbooked coach section leaned over to see what I was reading. I noted that it was a book about Lewis Carroll by the scholar Jan Susina, and shared that I had just learned that Carroll had written 98,721 letters, probably two thousand a year. She gasped and almost pulled the book from my hands in a sincere desire to learn more. The opportunity to learn more—to be startled by facts and surprising pieces of information and perception—is exactly what Susina provides us in this capacious, remarkable book that has broad appeal to nonacademics, scholars, and Carroll specialists. It is a text that generates delight, enthusiasm, and wonder. A contribution to Routledge's respected Children's Literature and Culture series, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature situates Carroll in literary and cultural history in a manner and method characterized by Susina's quoting of Umberto Eco: "Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has been told." Susina not only locates Carroll in the books, events, and literary figures that shaped or influenced him during the nineteenth century, but also grounds his discussion in more recent scholarship. In an organic, interconnecting process, Susina links Carroll's life and work to other artists and scholars and provides an internal bibliography, creating a tapestry of ideas and references. Susina self-consciously structures this study as a "series of interlinking chapters that focuses on Carroll's adventures as a children's writer" (2) and "a hypertext, like the Alice books themselves, in that the reader does not need to read it in a linear fashion, but can choose their own adventure by reading the chapters in a sequence of their own inventions" (3). This ethos of invention and playfulness informs Susina's study. With a nod to his keen awareness of the plethora of Carroll criticism, Susina begins his study with the wish "to find a bit of room and add to the lively discussion of Carroll. Like Alice, I suggest, "Come, we shall have some fun now!" (11). The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature consists of twelve pithy chapters that begin with Carroll's juvenilia and end with a critical examination [End Page 253] of contemporary multimedia adaptations. Intervening chapters provide a diverse array of Carrollian issues, including his photography of children, his extraordinary letter writing, class and gender issues, the tradition of the literary fairy tale, and his role as entrepreneur/businessman/marketer and contributor to the publishing industry. These subject areas—some familiarly controversial, some startlingly new—are re-presented through a rich analysis that integrates a prodigious understanding of Carrollian scholarship and cultural history. A core of key ideas presented in the Introduction weaves its way through the majority of these multifarious chapters. These ideas resituate Carroll's place in children's literature and present new "places" in which Carroll has been surprisingly influential. Right off (and throughout the essays), Susina takes strong issue with P. J. Harvey Darnton's pronouncement in Children's Books in England (1932) that Carroll's Alice books "changed the whole cast of children's literature" (3). The effect, notes Susina, was to mark Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as the great divide so that prior to its 1865 publication, all children's books were primarily instructional and afterward primarily "to entertain and delight." Susina argues that such distinctions are too neat, noting as evidence the publications of Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House in 1839 (a copy of which Carroll gave to Alice Liddell) and Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense in 1845. With this correction to the record, however, Susina also asserts that the Alice books themselves include "modest social lessons" as well as more explicitly didactic ones. As evidence, he cites paratextual materials included in later editions of the Alice books as well as in the Sylvie...

Las aventuras de Alicia en el maravilloso mundo del conocimiento: el camino hacia la actual alfabetización

Alice wants to study with amusing books filled with colorful drawings. "Alice's adventures in Wonderland" serves as excuse to introduce and discuss the current importance of digital literacy and how communication and information technologies have changed the way of transmitting and disseminating knowledge. Considering as a corollary, Alice today would have access to a multitude of beautiful multimedia documents, of greater or lesser quality, available through multiple paths. However, given her incipient education, knowing their true worth and aptitude is a privilege she has yet to obtain. This is her challenge!

Zhao Yuanren’s Translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Its Significance in Modern Chinese Literary History

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland first translated into Chinese by Zhao Yuanren was published in 1922. As an advocator of the New Literature Movement, Zhao chose to translate the famous fantastic novel in vernacular Chinese, which was virtually a linguistic experiment for the New Literature. He fulfilled the seemingly impossible mission and his version has been most popular till now. While the taste of Nonsense Literature which Zhao favored in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was ignored or changed in its two Chinese imitators: Shen Congwen’s Alice’s Adventures in China in 1928 and Chen Bochui’s Ms. Alice in 1931.

Historians on Writing

Historians on Writing Michael Kammen (bio) Historians distinguish themselves in diverse ways, yet relatively few are remembered as gifted prose stylists, and fewer still have left us non-didactic missives with tips about the finer points of writing well. Following his retirement from Cornell in 1941, Carl Becker accepted a spring term appointment as Neilson Research Professor at Smith College. Early in 1942 he delivered a charming address in Northampton titled “The Art of Writing.” Although admired as one of the most enjoyable writers among historians in the United States, Becker’s witty homily for the young women that day concerned good writing in general, and his exemplars ranged widely. He cited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, because “the author’s intention was to achieve a humorous obscurity by writing nonsense. He had a genius for that sort of thing, so that, as one may say, he achieved obscurity with a clarity rarely if ever equaled before or since.”1 Other notable historians have shared Becker’s belief that writing about the past is a form of art—or ideally, at least, ought to be. Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1912 capped the generations that so admired Francis Parkman and Henry Adams by designating his subject “History as Literature.” All too soon, however, TR’s highly idealized perspective seemed unattainable by the new professionals in academe. Even Becker swiftly became pessimistic about the prospects for historical “literature,” especially as he observed his guild developing in its formative years. He wrote candidly to a friend in 1915: It would be possible to get perhaps 20 men who could write good history in a straightforward and readable manner; but if they should be expected to raise their work to the level of real literature—to the level of [J. R.] Green or Parkman, for example—I fear it can’t be done. Men of high literary talent unfortunately do not go in for the serious study of history very often; and the study of history, as conducted in our universities, is unfortunately not designed to develop such talent as exists. Besides, history is I should say one of the most difficult subjects in the world to make literature out of; I mean history in the general sense, as distinct from biography or the narrative of some particular episode. Nevertheless, he went on to add: “Yet it is possible, and in my opinion highly desirable to come as near doing just that thing as possible. With all our busy activity history has less influence on the thought of our time than it had in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and one principal reason is that it isn’t read.”2 A generation later Samuel Eliot Morison, who took Parkman as his model, lamented that American historians “have forgotten that there is an art of writing history,” and titled his homily “History as a Literary Art.” Subsequently Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., George Kennan, and C. Vann Woodward also provided instructive essays explaining how and why historical writing might flow in a creative manner that can engage the general reader.3 In the mid-1980s, when the Library of America produced stout volumes of works by Parkman and Adams, Woodward seized upon those occasions as opportunities to explain why these authors once enjoyed popular appeal and remained eminently worthy of visitation: narrative power, irony, subtlety, and [End Page 17] ambiguity in Parkman, wit, irony, humor, and a love of paradox in the case of Adams, whom Woodward called a “master of English prose.”4 J.H. Hexter devoted at least half a dozen droll essays to the challenges of Doing History, and the particular problems faced by academic historians. After describing just how arduous historical research can be, he turned with characteristic whimsy to the equally demanding challenge of first-rate prose. [Once] the research ends, the working up of the evidence into a finished piece of history writing starts, and the historian at last tastes the pleasure of scholarly creation. Or does he? Well, if he has an aptitude at the management of evidence and a flare for vigorous prose, perhaps...

Through the Looking Glass: Our Autoethnographic Journey Through Research Mind-Fields

Two curriculum professors team taught naturalistic inquiry in an education college where research is the domain of a “service” department. Within the seminar, participants were challenged and transformed. Within the college, pillars of traditional research cracked. Conflicting streams of criticism, support, and imposition emerged, as grievances were filed and emails were requisitioned. Legalized bullying abounded. However, students continued to request their classes, and traditional pillars continue to crack. This article explores core questions such as the following: Who has the right to teach research? What constitutes legitimate research? What roles do narrative and imposition play in knowing and being known? Using a performative format, with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass as literary and methodological tools, the authors attempt to include readers in their arduous and sometimes comical journeys through the academic adolescence of Wonderland and back again through the looking glass.

Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives , and: The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership (review)

Reviewed by: Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives, and: The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership Chris McGee (bio) Sandra L. Beckett. Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2009. Rachel Falconer. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. New York: Routledge, 2009. Both of these two new studies on the phenomenon of so-called “crossover” fiction open with discussions of Harry Potter, something that should surprise almost no one. If there is any series that has, rightly or wrongly, been credited with seismic shifts in how children’s books get marketed and who exactly reads them it is certainly the Harry Potter books. Beckett notes how Rowling’s first novel is often thought of as “the crossover title, a kind of prototype of the genre” (1, emphasis in original). Falconer recalls first encountering it when her sister handed her a “paperback she had picked up in an airport shop on her way to India . . . a gloomy-looking book, with a black and white photo of a steam train approaching through fog on the cover” (1). From this simple book there quickly followed, she recalls, “an extraordinary period in which children’s literature exploded into the mainstream of popular and literary culture. Suddenly everyone was talking about children’s books, and not just Harry Potter, not just fantasy, but children’s fiction in all its variety and invention” (1). For Both Beckett and Falconer, the Harry Potter books represent the most recognizable example of the current crossover phenomenon: books read by both child and adult audiences; books consciously targeted to multiple demographics; authors who turn from writing adult fiction to writing children’s novels, or vice versa. As Beckett simply describes it, “Crossover fiction blurs the borderline between two traditionally separate readerships: children and adults” (3), something the Harry Potter books accomplished in seemingly unprecedented ways. If there is any single thing that connects both Beckett and Falconer’s books, however, it is that there are precedents for Harry Potter, that there is in fact a deeper history and broader perspective to this phenomenon than often gets acknowledged. Whereas Beckett attempts to place this phenomenon not only in a historical but also a global context, Falconer sets out to consider some of the more cultural and theoretical causes behind it. In that sense alone these two books complement each other especially well and are well worth recommending to anyone interested in the topic. [End Page 397] Beckett organizes her book around the broad categories that make up different types of crossover fiction and proceeds to work through as many examples as she can. There are lengthy chapters on so-called Adult-to-Child fiction (adult novels that are read by children and adolescents, including such standards as Gulliver’s Travels, A Christmas Carol, or The Time Machine), and Child-to-Adult fiction (children’s books read avidly by adults, including Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, or books with cult followings such as Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books). The most significant strength of Beckett’s book, however, is her scope. Beckett devotes significant portions of her book to authors and titles from a global perspective, including authors (both well known and lesser known) from Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Canada, Japan, Brazil, Norway, Ireland, Scotland, India, South Africa, Australia, Poland, the Netherlands, and the Ukraine, to name just a few. As a resource for titles, authors, and publishers, the book seems invaluable. Beckett notes, to take but one example, the publishing imprint Las Tres Edades from the Spanish publishing house Siruela, dedicated to the idea that “age boundaries are very artificial, and that certain texts are suitable for everyone” (197), and which publishes books aimed at simultaneous audiences of children and adults. In her opening, Beckett writes that “Crossover literature is generally seen as a new trend” (1), an idea she sets out to discredit by the sheer weight of examples to the contrary. She points out that crossover fiction was a vibrant phenomenon of the nineteenth century, in particular, and in earlier centuries if we consider books such as...

Children’s Literature and New Realities: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Daydreamer

Children’s Literature and New Realities: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Daydreamer