Gillian Beer

Alice in Space (eBook, ePUB)

The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The award-winning literary critic takes readers down the rabbit hole of Victorian cultural and intellectual influences on Lewis Carroll's Alice books.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderlandand Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll created fantastic worlds that continue to live in the minds of readers today. Carroll conceived his Alice books during the 1860s, a time of intense intellectual upheaval, as new scientific, linguistic, educational, and mathematical ideas flourished around the world. Alice in Spaceexplores these historic currents, revealing essential context for Carroll's jokes, concerns, and hidden references. Parody and Punch, evolutionary debates, philosophical dialogues, educational works for children, math and logic, manners and rituals, dream theory and childhood studies-all fueled the fireworks of Carroll's restless imagination. In this lively investigation, Gillian Beer convincingly shows him at play in the spaces of Victorian cultural and intellectual life, drawing on then-current controversies, reading prodigiously across many fields, and writing on multiple levels to please bothchildren and adultsin different ways. With a welcome combination of learning and lightness, Beer reminds us that Carroll's books are essentially about the risks and pleasures of curiosity. Along the way, Alice in Spaceshares Alice's exceptional ability to spark curiosity in us, too.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: The University of Chicago Press
• Seitenzahl: 306
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. März 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780226404790
• Artikelnr.: 47135852

Autorenporträt

Gillian Beer is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature Emerita at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fictionand Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998, she has edited popular editions of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Jane Austen's Persuasion, and Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense: Collected Poems.