Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, who lived from 1832 to 1898. ... He created many extemporaneous fairy stories to entertain the three girls; the Alice books grew out of one of these stories, which Carroll wrote down at Alices request. Carroll never married. ...
Dodgson’s affinity for young girls has prompted a number of attempts to exhume the spectre of unnatural desire from the texts. Like folktale counterparts, Carroll’s narratives abound in the imagery of sexual fantasy – rabbit-holes, magic potions which produce bodily metamorphoses, decapitation threats, and desires to be a queen. ... Are the Alice books truly love-gifts of a passion doomed to remain forever ungratified, or are they simply, as Carroll maintained, the friendly indulgence of a little girls wish? In the end, perhaps it does not matter what is true and what is dream when discussing this collection of dreams within dreams from the mind of one Lewis Carroll, who himself was merely the dream of a kind-hearted but slightly stuffy mathematician. Lewis Carroll uses paradox, anomaly, and semiotics in the form of nonsense, in his books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. ... Much of the adult popularity is due to the sophisticated problems in physics, metaphysics, logic, and semantics.
One of the most obvious effects of Carroll’s nonsense is to demonstrate the range of arbitrariness in the relation. ... Through an exploration of ambiguities inherent in English, primary figurative expressions and homophones, and through neologisms and paralogisms of his own devising, Carroll develops a narrative code governed by the rationale of free association. ... The language spoken here is not the language of dream allegory, but of real dreams. ... “The dream, like folktales and much modern absurd fiction, must put the hero’s adventure in the context of a lived experience” (Bloom 26). ... In fairytales and dream fiction, the hero’s acceptance of the impossible is not merely an ironic device, but it serves to indicate to the audience that the surrealistic episodes are meant to be understood metaphorically.
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