Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

A selective list of literary criticism for the British Victorian poet and children's writer Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources


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Introduction

"Lewis Carroll." An introduction to Lewis Carroll from the Poetry Foundation.

"Lewis Carroll." Essays on Lewis Carroll's writing techniques, themes, biography, and the Victorian background. The Victorian Web, ed. George Landow.

"Through the Looking Glass." Brief commentary and discussion questions on the Alice books, the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education.

"Lewis Carroll." A brief introduction to Lewis Carroll from the Academy of American Poets.

"A Lewis Carroll Centenary Exhibition." An online exhibit from the Univ. of Texas presents unusual artifacts from Carroll's childhood and his interest in logic, mathematics, and puzzles, along with his photographs.

"The Lewis Carroll Society." Web site for the UK organization devoted to Lewis Carroll, has information about his life and works, "About Charles Dodgson.".

"The Lewis Carroll Society of North America." An attractive and interesting web site for Lewis Carroll, but many broken links.

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." A segment on Lewis Carroll, from a college class on children's literature at Rutgers Univ. Includes discussion questions.


Literary Criticism

Ben-Zvi, Pinhas. "Lewis Carroll and the Search for Non-Being." Carroll was fascinated by the question of whether non-being, like being, exists, the author of this paper contends. The Philosopher, 90, 1.

Hidalgo, Laura. "Alice In Pragmaticland: Reference, Deixis And The Delimitation Of Text Worlds In Lewis Carroll's Alice Books," Patterns in Discourse and Text (1998).

Leach, Karoline. A review of In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (Peter Owen/Dufour). The reviewer notes "Leach's heretical thesis, which scandalizes and enrages orthodox Carrollians, is that C.L. Dodgson was primarily interested not in little girls but in sexually mature women." Reviewed by August A. Imholtz, Jr. in Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2000; another review from the NYTimes, 7 April 2002.

Lovell-Smith, R. "The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll's Reader" [illustrator John Tenniel]. Criticism 45, 4 (Fall 2003) pp 383-415 [substantial excerpt, muse].

Lucas, J.R. "Charles Dodson." Prof. Lukas comments on Lewis Carroll briefly as a mathematician and logician. A talk given in St Mary's, Guildford, UK, on 17 May 17 1998.

McLuhan, Marshall. "Bosch, Alice in Wonderland, and MAD Magazine." From Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964).

Milpas, Simon. "'I cried "Come, tell me how you live!/ And thumped him on the head': Wordsworth, Carroll and the 'Aged, Aged Man'" [and poet William Wordsworth]. Romanticism on the Net 5 (Feb. 1997).

Meyer, Jed. "The Vivisection of the Snark." On Lewis Carroll as an anti-vivisectionist [animal rights]. Victorian Poetry 47, 2 (2009) pp 429-48 [substantial excerpt, muse].

Nadel, Ira Bruce. "'The Mansion of Bliss,' or the Place of Play in Victorian Life and Literature." Children's Literature 10 (1982) pp 18-36 [substantial excerpt, muse].

Robson, Catherine. A sample chapter from Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton UP 2001). Masculinity and literature, the relationship between middle-class men and little girls in nineteenth-century British culture, covers William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, and Lewis Carroll.

Susina, Jan. "Lewis Carroll by the Numbers" [Lewis Carroll and mathematics]. Children's Literature 40 (2012) pp 256-59 [substantial excerpt, muse].

Woolf, Jenny. "Lewis Carroll's Bank Account." An annotated study of the records from Lewis Carroll's bank account, 1856-1900, revealing his attitudes about spending and money.


The Victorian Cultural Context

"Victorianism." The Victorian Web. Ed. George P. Landow. Essays topics include Victorianism as a Fusion of Neoclassical and Romantic Ideas; The Complex Realities of Victorianism; Main Currents in Victorian Intellectual History; The fundamental conflicts of Victorian poetry; Density and Elaborate Interconnectedness of High and Late Victorian culture; The Difficulties of Victorian Poetry; Victorian Doubt and Victorian Architecture; Victorian taste; Victorian Design; Race in Thought and Science; Victorian Earnestness; The Seaside in the Victorian Literary Imagination; Tennyson and Victorianism; The Victorian Gentleman; Crisis of Organized Religion; Queen Victoria.

"Monuments and Dust." Eds. Michael Levenson, David Trotter, Anthony Wohl. IATH, U of Va. A project by an international group of scholars who are creating a complex visual, textual, and statistical representation of Victorian London.

Jackson, Lee. "A Dictionary of Victorian London." Victorian social history through a "dictionary" of Victorian institutions.


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