About this title: As he escorted the three young daughters of a colleague on a trip up the river Isis, Lewis Carroll invented ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, the story of a little girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole. Full of such wonderfully eccentric characters as the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, and the Mad Hatter. The book is simultaneously a political allegory, a parody of Victorian children's literature, a fairy tale, a dream, and a child's chronicle of growing up.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. 0140383514 Good condition soft cover book, clean pages, some edge/corner rubs, some creasing to spine, this book is Good! Shop & Save With US. read more
Edition: reprint
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Bantam Classics, New York, NY
Date Published: 1981
ISBN-13:9780553213454ISBN:0553213458
Description: Gently read paperback in good condition. Previous owner's name has been blacked out inside front cover. NO other writing, highlighting, or dog-eared pages. Pages are age toned. Cover shows light wear with NO spine creasing. This edition includes the original illustrations by John Tenniel and an introduction by Morton N. Cohen. This edition also contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. Not one word has been omitted, as stated on the copyright page. read more
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Yearling, New York
Date Published: 1992
ISBN-13:9780440407430ISBN:0440407435
Description: Tenniel, John. Very Good. No Jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Very nice clean flat paperback with only very light overall wear. pages clean and unmarked. nice copy! read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Puffin Books
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780140383515ISBN:0140383514
Description: Tenniel, John, Sir. Fine. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 336 p. Contains: Illustrations. Intended for a juvenile audience. Fine read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780451527745ISBN:0451527747
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780451527745ISBN:0451527747
Description: New. Slight shelf wear with slight scuffing to cover, corners and edges. GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
"This is a good book. I saw the cartoon when I was younger and then started reading in when I was in 12th grade after learning that Alice was a real girl, Alice Liddell, The poem that is in the book, if you look down, it spells Alice Liddell. When Lewis Carroll wrote this book and I wanted to learn more about the adventures that Lewis wrote about Alice and how Victorian children acted in that time period because all we have really is from history books and a real book would be more interesting.
For instance, she is very concerned about having good manners, is always trying remember the lessons she's had in her schoolroom, and frequently gets frightened and lonely enough to burst into tears -- all things we might expect from a lost seven-year-old girl from 1865. On the other hand, when she forgets to be frightened Alice is very bold indeed: she plays practical jokes and tells painful truths, she stands up for herself even against the most powerful people, and she can easily fall into the dream-like way of thinking shared by the people Wonderland.
This is what Lewis was really trying to introduce to us. The kind of girl Alice was."
"To competently understand any given text, a reader must learn to identify the codes behind them. For example, we read a detective story differently than we would a romance novel, a lyric poem or a Greek tragedy. Codes teach us how to make sense of a text, how to approach them, and how we can relate them to our own individual and unique experiences. Approaching Alice in Wonderland is no different.
To competently understand the novel is to accept the primary code of reinstating one's self with a childlike sensibility, for as Virginia Woolf acutely observed, "The two Alices are not books for children, they are the only books in which we become children." First and foremost, then, Alice is a story that requires the reader to resurrect the codes of childlike ingenuity: wonder, humility, imagination, that insatiable thirst for knowledge, sensitivity, playfulness and so on.
According to structural linguist Robert Scholes, Alice in Wonderland possess extreme "literariness" (i.e. what makes a work a work of art) in the sense that the story concerns itself with the questions of meaning. The six features of Roman Jakobson's literary communicative devices (sender, receiver, message, context, contact or code), as exemplified in Alice in Wonderland are constantly shifting, being toyed with.
We think of all the absurd characters Alice meets-from querulous logicians to niggling philosophers-and we see how all of them are ready to pounce on her like vultures for every phrase, idiom and ideology she speaks, which, in virtue of her naivety, can be wrestled into the anomalous and discomforting realm of nonsense. In this sense, not only is Alice aware of her shortcomings, but the story is too. Both Alice and author, Lewis Carroll, seem to share the same childlike ingenuity of wonder, and, have complicated the use of persona.
The textual structure of Alice in Wonderland gives rise to crucial binary codes, each which give the story its rich and compelling meaning. Some of those binaries include: manners and madness, food and the food chain, childhood and adulthood, freedom and rules, authority and identity, sense and nonsense, and meaning and meaninglessness to name a few. It is only in the twined books (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) that Carroll found a medium to explore these puzzling temperaments with respect to their absurd investment in the nature of questions and meaning.
The questions of meaning and nonsense haunt Alice and many of her fellow interlocutors to the point where she bleakly cries out, "It's really dreadful the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!" Many of these maddening arguments concern the questions of identity, names, logic, semantics, age and other vexing problems that have nagged philosophers since Socrates. The seven-year old is drowning in a sea of (absurd) information and at the same time starving for its meaning; all which challenges the conceptual foundations of her world. It is no wonder that the relation between children, jokes and meaning raised by the Red Queen foreshadows alarm to readers from the beginning.
The codes invisibly working on the reader require a leap of faith into the absurd; a willingness to be torn between sense and nonsense; a perpetual divide between two contradictory positions adopted by Alice and the King: to find meaning in the story as Alice does, or, finding "no meaning in it whatsoever" as the King proclaims. However, readers be warned that the gaining of meaning as well as the losing of meaning involves both pleasure and pain. For in Alice's world, "nothing would be what it is, but everything would be what it isn't. And contrariwise, what it is, it isn't, and what it isn't, it is. You see?"
Introductions inevitably come before adventures in the story, and introductions tend to mean explanations, or caveats. After all, explanations are all Alice ever seems to ask for; sadly, however, that adventurous side of her deafens after awhile. I mean, who wouldn't in such a wacky world? After reading the story, one is beholden to Alice's query: "It seems very pretty, but it's rather hard to understand." "Somehow it fills my head with ideas," she reflects, "only I don't exactly know what they are." In this sense, the story reflects an intentional absurdity and randomness that is supposed to mirror that of life itself. And it is this absurdity and randomness that challenges us to create meaningful structures and patterns in order to make sense of the fluctuating details of our otherwise chaotic, nihilistic lives.
For the reader of the Alice books to create his or her own pattern of meanings, interpretations and ideas in the face of the ongoing flux of absurd experiences in the novel itself, is, in virtue of being human, a deeply pleasurable experience. A message is being given between the lines of the story: that an individuals capacity to create meaning in a seemingly meaningless world is the meaning of life. As I have often said of my own existential apologist position: "I have found meaning where perhaps the meaner did not mean to mean...know what I mean?""
"This book wasn't at all what I thought it was. All these years, I thought it would be this trippy, completely balmy story, that people read while they were stoned. Turns out, it's just an average book, with a little bit of nonsense thrown in. I really enjoyed the Jabberwocky poem. The rest of the book was just an average children's story. In fact, it was rather a push to get through, which is unusual to me. No matter - it's still a rather referenced piece of literature.
The fact, though, that Wikipedia had this to say about it, made me laugh out loud, literally: "The poem is sometimes used in primary schools to teach students about the use of portmanteau and nonsense words in poetry, as well as use of nouns and verbs." Haha, not in primary schools in the States!"
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