1860s
A01=Gillian Beer
absurd
Author_Gillian Beer
authority
bronte
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
childhood
childrens
control
curiosity
darwin
doubling
doubt
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
etiquette
evolution
expansion
fantasy
games
growing
humor
huxley
identity
imagination
intellectual history
invention
john stuart mill
justice
knowledge
linguistics
literary criticism
manners
mathematics
max muller
morality
names
parody
place
play
power
punch
puns
revolution
satire
science
social change
spaces
subversive
victorian literature
Product details
- ISBN 9780226041506
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll created fantastic worlds that continue to delight and trouble readers of all ages today. What is often overlooked, however, is that Carroll conceived his Alice books during the 1860s, a moment of intense intellectual upheaval, as new scientific, linguistic, educational, and mathematical ideas flourished around him, in Oxford, and far beyond. Alice in Space reveals the contexts within which the Alice books first lived, bringing back the zest to jokes lost over time and poignancy to hidden references. Gillian Beer explores Carroll's work through the speculative gaze of Alice, for whom no authority is unquestioned and everything can speak. 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.
While much has been written about Carroll's biography and his influence on children's literature, 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 both children and adults in different ways. With a welcome combination of learning and lightness, Beer reminds us that Carroll's books are essentially about curiosity, its risks and pleasures. Along the way, Alice in Space shares Alice's exceptional ability to spark curiosity in us, too.
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 Fiction and 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.
