Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-first Century edited by Cristopher Hollingsworth.
Forward by Karoline Leach.
Published by the University of Iowa Press, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1587298196
I’m indebted to this book for reminding me of a part of my childhood that I’d forgotten: the Goops. (There’s a picture from the Goops used on page 40).
Cristopher Hollingsworth is associate professor of English at the University of South Alabama. Karoline Leach wrote “In the Shadow of the Dreamchild” (ISBN 0-7206-1044-3), which explored and contradicted the “Carroll Myth”- the fallacious perception of Carroll as some kind of drug-addled paedophile.
Review from Will Brooker, author of Alice’s Adventure: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture:
“Alice beyond Wonderland offers an exciting range of new perspectives on the Alice books, linked around the core theme of space. This impressive collection will make an excellent and original contribution to the literature on Alice and Carroll.”
Product description:
“Alice beyond Wonderland” explores the ubiquitous power of Lewis Carroll’s imagined world. Including work by some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the field of Lewis Carroll studies, all introduced by Karoline Leach’s edgy foreword, “Alice beyond Wonderland” considers the literary, imaginative, and cultural influences of Carroll’s nineteenth-century story on the high-tech, postindustrial cultural space of the twenty-first century. The scholars in this volume attempt to move beyond the sexually charged permutations of the ‘Carroll myth’, the image of an introverted man fumbling into literary immortality through his love for a prepubescent Alice. Contributions include an essay comparing Dantean and Carrollian underworlds, one investigating child characters as double agents in untamed lands, one placing Wonderland within the geometrical and algebraic ‘fourth dimension’, one investigating the visual and verbal interplay of hand imagery, and one exploring the influence of Japanese translations of Alice on the Gothic-Lolita subculture of neo-Victorian enthusiasts. This is a bold, capacious, and challenging work.
I’d be lying if I said I’d read this, but it’s certainly on the list- it looks fascinating, and is well produced and illustrated. I especially love the Cheshire Cat on the cover: Barnaby Ward is the artist.
Available on amazon: Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-first Century
Alice in the Internet 
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