Alice beyond wonderland : essays for the twenty-first century /

These essays are, as Alice would say, "curiouser and curiouser." The "beyond" in the title is key to understanding the editor's goal. The essays, writes Hollingsworth (Univ. of South Alabama), demonstrate that "Wonderland is part of a shared cognitive and cultural horizon, an unfolding complex of spaces that has much to teach us about ourselves, our moment, and the Lebenswelt of the future." Using various theoretical approaches--feminist, new historical, post-structural, intertextual, postcolonial--the contributors endeavor to move research on Charles Dodson (Lewis Carroll) beyond the myth of the quaint Oxford clergyman who (perhaps salaciously?) photographed little girls and wrote stories for and about them. Several essays engage recent texts that revise Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: women's memoirs of mental illness, graphic novels. One provides an interview with sci-fi author Rudy Rucker about the ways Alice influenced his work; others offer new disciplinary perspectives (gerontology, hyperspace philosophy). But the most intriguing essays explicate the relationship between text and image in the original Alice; looking at the John Tenniel illustrations and Carroll's photographic methods, these consider Victorian cartes de visite, photo albums, collage, and the imagery of hands. The essays are uniformly well written, theoretically informed, and intellectually challenging but never arcane. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. E. R. Baer Gustavus Adolphus College