Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

byLewis Carroll, Charlie Lovett (Introducer)

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When Alice follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole, little does she know that she is traveling to a world of magic where common-sense is turned upside-down. The dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the backwards Looking-Glass kingdom are full of the unexpected: a baby turns into a pig, time is missing at a tea-party, and a wild chess game makes the seven-year-old Alice a queen. Displaying Lewis Carroll's gift for sparkling wordplay, puzzles, and riddles, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass offer magical adventure, pointed satire of Victorian England, and playful explorations of sophisticated logic. Yet amid Carroll's antic humor and joyful creation, poignant moments of nostalgia for fleeting childhood give the stories extraordinary emotional depth. And wherever Carroll takes Alice, John Tenniel's iconic illustrations follow with whimsical depictions of her tizzying journeys. Original, experimental, and unparalleled for pure delight, the adventures of Alice in Wonderland are tales to be read and shared across generations.

A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices...Nonsense becomes a form of higher sense"
Malcolm Bradbury

It would not have occurred to me even to suspect that the "children's tale" was in brilliant ways coded to be read by adults and was in fact an English classic, a universally acclaimed intellectual tour de force and what might be described as a psychological/anthropological dissection of Victorian England. It seems not to have occurred to me that the child- Alice of drawing rooms, servants, tea and crumpets and chess, was of a distinctly different background than my own. I must have been the ideal reader: credulous, unjudging, eager, thrilled. I knew only that I believed in Alice, absolutely."
Joyce Carol Oates

About Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), grew up in Cheshire in the village of Daresbury, the son of a parish priest. He was a brilliant mathematician, a skilled photographer and a meticulous letter and diary writer. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, inspired by Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, was published in 1865, followed by Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. He wrote numerous stories and poems for children including the nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark and fairy stories Sylvie and Bruno.

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