Alice's Journey to the End of Night

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 313-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Rackin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Lewis Carroll ◽  
Symbolic Logic ◽  
Adult Readers ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Lay Reader ◽  
Charles Dodgson ◽  
Looking Glass

In the century now passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, scores of critical studies have attempted to account for the fascination the book holds for adult readers. Although some of these investigations offer provocative insights, most of them treat Carroll in specialized modes inaccessible to the majority of readers, and they fail to view Alice as a complete and organic work of art. Hardly a single important critique has been written of Alice as a self-contained fiction, distinct from Through the Looking-Glass and all other imaginative pieces by Carroll. Critics also tend to confuse Charles Dodgson the man with Lewis Carroll the author; this leads to distorted readings of Alice that depend too heavily on the fact, say, that Dodgson was an Oxford don, or a mathematician, or a highly eccentric Victorian gentleman with curious pathological tendencies. The results are often analyses which fail to explain the total work's undeniable impact on the modern lay reader unschooled in Victorian political and social history, theoretical mathematics, symbolic logic, or Freudian psychology. It seems time, then, that Alice be treated for what it most certainly is—a book of major and permanent importance in the tradition of English fiction, a work that still pertains directly to the experience of the unspecialized reader, and one that exemplifies the profound questioning of reality which characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature.

Universities in Wonderland

1990 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Weale
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Relative Size ◽  
Lewis Carroll ◽  
Alice In Wonderland ◽  
Children's Stories ◽  
Literary Devices ◽  
Looking Glass ◽  
Funding Council

Perhaps the allusions and references contained in the first part of this article might not be readily intelligible to someone whose childhood was not spent listening to stories from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or to someone not presently involved in the current debates about the finance of United Kingdom universities. Let me therefore offer a few words of explanation.Alice in Wonderland, and its companion Alice Through the Looking Glass, are children's stories which explore the limits of reason in most creative ways. Their author, the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, a nineteenth-century mathematician at Christchurch, Oxford who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll, used the stories to discuss the nature of limit processes in mathematics, the phenomenon of relative size and aspects of the absurd. In the stories animals speak, playing cards come to life and the heroine, Alice, undergoes many transformations of bodily size. Since I regard the recent research selectivity exercise of the Universities Funding Council (UFC) as beyond the limits of reason, I have drawn upon the Alice stories by way of satire and I have tried to use some typical Carroll literary devices — plays on words, accounts of physical transformations and the like — to emphasize the relevant points.

Critical Contexts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Postcolonial Criticism ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This concluding chapter argues that the critical contexts of the literary texts dealt with in this volume cannot be so confined inside the period before 1950, not merely for writers whose works have maintained or increased their esteem, but also for the bulk of that work belonging to the large categories of colonial, Victorian, and even nationalist writing that exhibits the values and attitudes of empire. Much of the postcolonial criticism of colonial fiction treats it as symptomatic of imperial views on race, nature, gender, or progress rather than as literature Criticism in this volume means something distinct from that applied to nineteenth-century English literature or American modernist fiction where the specifically literary qualities and values of the writing remain central concerns of its criticism, even where the values and ideology of modernism, for example, have been sharply contested.

Institution-Induced Stability

2019 ◽  
pp. 84-102
Author(s):  
Kenneth A. Shepsle
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Majority Rule ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Lewis Carroll ◽  
Simple Majority ◽  
Simple Majority Rule ◽  
Technical Literature ◽  
Marquis De Condorcet ◽  
Charles Dodgson

Simple majority rule is badly behaved. This is one of the earliest lessons learned by political scientists in the positive political theory tradition. Discovered and rediscovered by theorists over the centuries (including, famously, the Majorcan Franciscan monk Raymon Llull in the thirteenth century, the Marquis de Condorcet in the eighteenth, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) in the eighteenth, and Duncan Black in the twentieth), the method of majority rule cannot be counted on to produce a rational collective choice. In many circumstances (made precise in the technical literature), it is very likely (a claim also made precise) that whatever choice is produced will suffer the property of not being “best” in the preferences of all majorities: for any candidate alternative, there will always exist another alternative that some majority prefers to it. This chapter suggests that while a collection of preferences often cannot provide a collectively “best” choice, institutional arrangements, which restrict comparisons of alternatives, may allow majority rule to function more smoothly. That is, where equilibrium induced by preferences alone may fail to exist, institutional structure may induce stability.

The Latah Reaction: Its Pathodynamics and Nosological Position

1952 ◽  
Vol 98 (413) ◽  
pp. 515-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Yap
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Intrinsic Interest ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
Mental Diseases ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Unusual Symptoms

Few mental diseases have attracted the attention of medical men working in outlandish parts of the world more than Latah. This is due, not only to its intrinsic interest, showing as it regularly does the unusual symptoms of echolalia, echopraxia, and automatic obedience, but also to its remarkable geographical distribution. This illness was described by travellers to the Malay Archipelago in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but very similar reactions were later found to exist in other lands, known to the native peoples by other names. The term “Latah,” however, is the best known, and as the common features between these various reactions became apparent, it has been used as an inclusive name for them all. It is to-day employed with much the same connotation in the French, Dutch, Italian, and English literature, but the discussion of its nature betrays inadequate understanding, attempts at its nosological classification remain unsatisfactory, and speculations as to its aetology continue to be somewhat fanciful.

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