Modernism in Wonderland: Legacies of Lewis Carroll

(Hardback)

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Retracing the steps of a surprising array of twentieth-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carrolls fictions and discovered there the quintessence of their own modernity, this book demonstrates that Carrolls influence extended far beyond literary style. Chapters show how Carrolls writings had a far reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics, from philosophy to the new physics. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental. This book shows us the Alice we recognize from Carrolls novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.

Reviews

With verve and imagination, Witten and Morgenstern have brought together an eclectic and stimulating new set of essays on Carrolls modernist afterlives. Who could resist a tea-party (or should that be a caucus race) at which such older children Joyce and Flann OBrien, Woolf and Kate Chopin, Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers, Walter Benjamin and Auden, Borges, Marquez, and Nabokov, Plath and Elizabeth Bishop - are gathered When James Joyce called Jung and Freud Tweedledum and Tweedledee, he was proving Carrolls immense capacity for explaining the modern world. The essays in this collection confirm this over and over again. They expel the idea that Modernism was a rejection of Victorian culture; that Carrolls Alice books could be perceived as peripheral to the development of 20th Century Literature. And they affirm that modernist writers drew on Carroll because he revealed how threatening the regimes of reason, knowledge, and social ritual could be; and because he showed ways of contesting those regimes. Theres glory for you. * Finn Fordham, Professor of 20th Century Literature, Royal Holloway University of London, UK *

Author Bio

John D. Morgenstern is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University, USA. He has published articles and book chapters on modernist literature and coedited The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts. He is the General Editor of The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual and the director of Clemson University Press. Michelle Witen (DPhil, Oxford) is a Junior Professor at the Europa-Universitt Flensburg, Germany, specializing in British and Irish literatures of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of James Joyce and Absolute Music (Bloomsbury 2018) and co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly.