Alternative Alices

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) are among the most enduringly influential works in the English language. In the decades following their publication, male and female writers on both sides of the Atlantic, radicals as well as conservatives, producer no fewer than 200 imitations, revisions, and parodies of Carroll's fantasies for children. In this delightful anthology, Carolyn Sigler gathers twenty of the most interesting and original of these responses to the Alice books, many of them long out of print.Produced between 1869 and 1930 -- the golden age of Carroll's influence on popular literature -- these works trace the extraordinarily creative, and often critical, response of diverse writers. The authors of this period appropriated the structures, motifs, and themes of Carroll's works to engage in larger cultural debates raised by the Alice books and their reception. The stories gathered here range from Christina Rosselti's angry subversion of Alice's adventures, Speaking Likenesses (1874), to G.E. Farrow's witty fantasy adventure, The Wallypug of Why (1895), to Edward Hope's hilarious parody of social and political foibles, Alice in the Delighted States (1928). Original illustrations add to the charm of the stories.Alternately satiric, enchanting, experimental, and subversive, these Alice. inspired works reveal how variously Carroll's books were read, reinscribed, and resisted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone who has ever followed Alice down the rabbit hole will enjoy the adventures of her literary siblings in the wide Wonderland of the human imagination.