scholarly journals A “Fabulous Monster” and a “Wonderful Boy:” Gender and the Elusive Victorian Child in the Alice Books and Peter Pan

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 312-323
Author(s):  
Friederike Frenzel
Keyword(s):  
Peter Pan ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Temporal Aspects ◽  
Looking Glass ◽  
British Children

Abstract Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” are highly critiqued and explored works of British children literature. Both queer and hermeneutic readings allow approaches that intrinsically question gender dichotomies, providing tools to pick out underlying themes. Thus, focusing on the concepts of the “child hero” and the “genderless child” of Carroll’s and Barrie’s respective Victorian and Edwardian backgrounds, spatial – the dream worlds of the Wonder- and the Looking-Glass land, the colonized Island of Neverland – as well as temporal aspects – the linear, episodic quest of Alice, the immortal, cyclical existence of Peter – point to the subversive elements of play, memory, and narration in the texts. While Alice is bridging dream and reality in an oscillating, paradoxical act of self-aware transformation, Peter is otherworldly and inhuman himself, actively rejecting heteronormative standards and demands. Both are trespassers and assume roles, and confuse, adapt, and bend supposedly fixed rules. Their transgressions are subdued in the pretended ahistoricity of children’s storytelling, referring to the responsibility of adaptions to further expand the hermeneutical circle.

Not No Rapunzel

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-347
Author(s):  
Laura Halperin
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Third World ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Outright Rejection ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
American Folklore ◽  
Looking Glass

Abstract In this article, Laura Halperin reads Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street as a disidentificatory, revisionist, and intersectional collection of fairy tales. Halperin builds on critical scholarship about The House on Mango Street and fairy tales and inflects a U.S. Third World feminist analysis by examining how the narrative draws attention to the ways gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class are entwined. Rather than view the text as an outright rejection of the dubious premises and promises provided by fairy tales—individualist, (hetero)sexist, classist, and racist ones—she argues that the book references such tales at length to highlight their widespread power while also challenging their problematic ideologies. The simultaneous engagement with and contestation of these stories are what makes Cisneros’s text revisionist and disidentificatory, and Cisneros’s attention to the particular concerns faced by impoverished females of color makes the text intersectional. The two tales with which Cisneros most explicitly engages are “Cinderella” and “Rapunzel,” and the two central images in her collection are shoes and windows. The House on Mango Street also references other stories and rhymes, including “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Peter Pan,” “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Little House, just as it invokes Mexican (American) folklore and Greek and Roman mythology. Cisneros’s mimetic repetition of these narratives underscores their pervasiveness and allure while critiquing the myths they advance.

Australian governments protecting children in detention: A view through the looking glass

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Max Liddell ◽  
Chris Goddard
Keyword(s):  
Child Protection ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Children And Families ◽  
Australian Government ◽  
The South ◽  
Immigration Detention ◽  
Child Protection Workers ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Looking Glass

This article analyses the Australian Government’s communications on children in immigration detention, particularly those detained at Woomera and Baxter Detention Centres. The authors examine paradoxes and ‘double-bind’ theory; theory which analyses communications which continually put the target of them in the wrong and allow no escape. The analysis uses selected passages from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ to highlight the nature and impact of such communication. The authors conclude that the Australian Government has consistently used paradoxical communication. In doing so it has placed children and families in detention, child protection workers, the South Australian Government, and sometimes external critics in a communication trap from which it is difficult to escape. Other bodies such as Courts have also demonstrated much paradox in their behaviour and communications on detention issues.

Epilogue: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

1995 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine K. Kinsey ◽  
Suzanne W. Gergonis
Keyword(s):  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Looking Glass

FALLING DOWN IN ORDER TO GROW UP: TWO WOMEN’S JOURNEYS FROM UN-DOMESTICATION TO DOMESTICATION IN FANTASY FICTION

Mousaion ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-91
Author(s):  
Deirdre Byrne ◽  
Mary-Anne Potter
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Specific Process ◽  
Fantasy Fiction ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Poststructuralist Theory ◽  
Looking Glass

AbstractIn this article, following the convention adopted in The annotated Alice (Gardner 2000), the authors refer to the combined volume of Lewis Carroll’s works – entitled Alice in Wonderland – which includes Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the looking-glass – as ‘the Alice texts’. In the Alice texts, Alice is presented as a Victorian female protagonist who has to ‘fall down’ in order to ‘grow up’. This is also true of Yvaine in Neil Gaiman’s Victorian-based novel, Stardust (1999). Both protagonists experience ‘falling down’, which also carries the symbolic weight of being an act of submission – falling into a subordinate state. In looking at the significance of the opposing movements up and down as indicative of a specific process of female domestication, postmodern and poststructuralist theory explains how this binary opposition fulfils a specific didactic function in Victorian and Victorian-based fairy tale narratives. Historical approaches to Victorian society also demonstrate the submissive role assigned to women in Victorian society. While ‘un-domestication’ is rejected in favour of domestic submission in Carroll’s and Gaiman’s narratives, ‘un-domestication’ results in the liberation of their central female protagonists in the filmic revisionings, Alice in Wonderland (2010), directed by Tim Burton, and Stardust (2007), directed by Matthew Vaughn.

Lewis Carroll: author and mathematician

1964 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 571-573
Author(s):  
Robert L. Stright
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
Lewis Carroll ◽  
Precise Meaning ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Poetic Imagination ◽  
Mathematical Mind ◽  
Looking Glass

Millions of children and adults are acquainted with the book, Alice in Wonderland, and its author, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). It is also a fairly well-known fact that Carroll was some sort of a mathematician. Few people realize, however, the amount of mathematics contained in this seemingly simple book and others like it. Nor do most people realize the effect of Carroll's mathematical mind upon his work. “Alice in Wonder land owes its unique place in our literature to the fact that it was the work of a genius, that of a mathematician and logician who was also a humorist and a poet.”1 In fact, the “Alice” books (Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) have been described as the “original work of a mathematician and logician, interested in the precise meaning of words, who was at the same time a genius of invention and poetic imagination with a love for children and a gift for entertaining them.”2

scholarly journals On Intertextual Interpretation of Leitmotivs and Images of Lewis Carroll’s Fairy Tales “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” in Nabokov’s Novels

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Tatiana Belova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Vladimir Nabokov ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Intertextual Connections ◽  
Looking Glass

The paper comprises versatile intertextual connections between Lewis Carroll’s fairy tales (“Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”) and Nabokov’s novels as regards their system of images, leitmotivs and key-words, similar poetic principles and elements of structure, artistically implemented by Vladimir Nabokov in the text with the purpose of demonstrating the infinite resources of the language as the instrument of creation.

Alice through Macunaíma's looking-glass

1986 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 216
Author(s):  
Myriam Corrêa de Araújo Ávila
Keyword(s):  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Final Version ◽  
External Influences ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Looking Glass

The comparison of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the looking-glass with Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma leads to the delimitation of the achievements of these books. A critical evaluation is made of their emphasis on the question of language, their relation to other pre-existent texts of which they avail themselves, and the relative openness of each of the texts to external influences. The shift of critical standpoint obtained by focusing on a book from the viewpoint of another book allows a new appreciation of each and the revelation of what each is not. In the gap arising from the difference between the texts it is possible to perceive elements that would not otherwise the visible. The affirmation of one text toward the other can be described as a translation in which the modification undergone by the original and the recreation of aesthetic elements in the final version reach their maximum.

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