Recommendations from our site
“Scholars have been able to find some really interesting conversation between the texts of Phantastes and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In structure, the novels are very similar. There are even certain sections, like the conversation with the flowers, where Dodgson is using the exact same words, the exact same names of the exact same plants as MacDonald. So they’re clearly having fun back and forth with each other, playing with the words and the ideas of someone else.” Read more...
The Best Victorian Fantasy Novels
Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, Literary Scholar
“I love Alice’s growing sense of wonder at the topsy-turvy universe she enters. Wonder, as Plato and Aristotle tell us, is the beginning of philosophy, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a deeply philosophical book. Alice is besieged by humans, some enraged, others just plain eccentric. Surrounded by falling objects, bewildered by beasts, and doing her best to stay afloat in a pool of tears, poor Alice is so disoriented that she’s in a state of permanent existential crisis. In the end, she stands up to all the outlandish creatures in Wonderland, and then skips off to have a cup of tea, leaving you wondering about Alice and her close encounters with nonsense, disorder, and lawlessness.” Read more...
Maria Tatar, Literary Scholar
“An imaginative, clever and fun fantasy story that satirises nineteenth century England at the same time as celebrating academic thinking. It is about sideways thinking, lateral thinking and connections. That whole focus, from a literary perspective, on language—the puns and the syllogisms.” Read more...
“You’d have to be a zombie to miss the humour in it – it’s hilarious. Although the book is ancient the humour feels modern. It’s also very dark. I can’t tell you how many jokes there are about dead children in it. Rereading it now, I realise a lot of my comic style comes out of that book. Carroll understates everything. It’s filled with phrases like “if I should fall on my head I don’t think I’d have much to say about it” – which would certainly be true because she’d be dead.” Read more...
The best books on Comic Writing
Larry Doyle, Comedians & Humorist
