‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury’: ‘Tail’-Telling, Imperialism and the Other in Alice in Wonderland

Authors

  • Caroline Webb University of Newcastle, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2010vol20no2art1142

Keywords:

Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll, race, other, Victorian children's literature

Abstract

The review and analysis of Lewis Carroll's Alice - both 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking-Glass' are discussed. Alice portrays a child immersed in Victorian cultural perceptions of race and in contemporary English attitudes to the Other.

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Author Biography

  • Caroline Webb, University of Newcastle, Australia
    Dr Caroline Webb is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She specialises in study of British Modernism and contemporary fiction, and is particularly interested in fantastic fiction, including fantasy for children. Her published articles include discussion of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, and J.K. Rowling, among others. She is currently working on a study of the British fantasy tradition and its relationship to British postmodern writing, and is serving as Secretary to the Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research.

References

Anon (1991) “Tale in tail(s): a study worthy of Alice’s friends,” New York Times 1 May 1991, B1. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/01/books/tale-in-tail-s-a-study-worthy-of-alice-s-friends.html?scp=1&sq=Alice+in+Wonderland&st=nyt [Accessed 10 August 2010].

Arnold, M. (1910) ‘On the Study of Celtic Literature’ (1867), in On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays . London, Dent. See also The Project Gutenberg eBook of Celtic Literature, by Matthew Arnold. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/celt10h.htm

Auerbach, N. (1973) ‘Alice in Wonderland: a curious child’, Victorian Studies 17, 31-47. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3826513

Bivona, D. (1986) ‘Alice the child-imperialist and the games of Wonderland’, Nineteenth -Century Literature 41, 143- 71. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3045136

Carroll, L. (1992) Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative texts of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking- Glass, The Hunting of the Snark, Backgrounds, Essays in Criticism (ed D. Gray, 2nd ed. ). New York, Norton.

Carroll, L. (2009) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , illustrated by Arthur Rackham with a proem by Austin Dobson (1907), Project Gutenberg’s Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/28885 [Accessed 13 August 2010].

Geer, J. (2003) ‘“All sorts of pitfalls and surprises”: competing views of idealized girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books’, Children’s Literature 31, 1-24. Available from: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/childrens_literature/v031/31.1geer.html

Kelly, R. (1990) Lewis Carroll (rev. ed.). Boston, Twayne.

Kincaid, J. R. (1973) ‘Alice’s invasion of Wonderland’, PMLA 88, 92 -99. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/pss/461329

Kutzer, M. D. (2000) Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books . New York, Garland.

Minslow, S. G. (2009) Can Children’s Literature be Non-Colonizing? A Dialogic Approach to Nonsense. PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, Australia. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/802970

Rose, J. (1984) The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction . London, Macmillan.

Rother, C. (1984) ‘Lewis Carroll’s lesson: coping with fears of personal destruction’, Pacific Coast Philology 19, 89-94. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/pss/1316586

Stephens, J. (1992) Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London, Longman.

Warren, A. (1980) ‘Carroll and his Alice books’, The Sewanee Review 88, 331-53. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/pss/27543708

Webb, C. (1998) ‘“Bodily weakness” and the “free boy”: physicality as subversive agent in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ’, in J. Brannigan, G. Ward, and J. Wolfreys (eds) Re: Joyce: Text, Culture, Politics . Houndmills, Basingstoke, Macmillan, pp. 87-103.

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Published

2010-07-01

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Articles

How to Cite

“‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury’: ‘Tail’-Telling, Imperialism and the Other in Alice in Wonderland” (2010) Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 20(2), pp. 1–10. doi:10.21153/pecl2010vol20no2art1142.

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