Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (The Penguin English Library) - Softcover

Carroll, Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141199687 ISBN 13: 9780141199689

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2012

Synopsis

The Penguin English Library Edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

'"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). "Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Goodbye, feet!"'

'I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole ... without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,' wrote Lewis Carroll, describing how Alice was conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. His dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig, time is abandoned at a disorderly tea-party and a chaotic game of chess makes a seven-year-old girl a Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling word play, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for lost childhood.

The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

About this title

Review:

"A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices...Nonsense becomes a form of higher sense"
-Malcolm Bradbury
""Alice in Wonderland" is one of the top 25 books of all time. I always loved the book and I always loved the various characters, the psychedelic nature of it and kind-of odd allegorical stories inside stories. I always thought it was beautiful."
-Jonny Depp
"Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass were, I always knew, different from other imagined worlds. Nothing could be changed, although things in the story were always changing...Carroll moves his readers as he moves chess pieces and playing cards."
-A. S. Byatt
"It would not have occurred to me even to suspect that the "children's tale" was in brilliant ways coded to be read by adults and was in fact an English classic, a universally acclaimed intellectual tour de force and what might be described as a psychological/anthropological dissection of Victorian England. It seems not to have occurred to me that the child-Alice of drawing rooms, servants, tea and crumpets and chess, was of a distinctly different background than my own. I must have been the ideal reader: credulous, unjudging, eager, thrilled. I knew only that I believed in Alice, absolutely."
-Joyce Carol Oates
"The "Alices" are the greatest nonsense ever written, and far greater, in my view, than most sense."
-Philip Pullman

A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices Nonsense becomes a form of higher sense
Malcolm Bradbury
Alice in Wonderlandis one of the top 25 books of all time. I always loved the book and I always loved the various characters, the psychedelic nature of it and kind-of odd allegorical stories inside stories. I always thought it was beautiful.
Jonny Depp

Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass were, I always knew, different from other imagined worlds. Nothing could be changed, although things in the story were always changing Carroll moves his readers as he moves chess pieces and playing cards.
A. S. Byatt
It would not have occurred to me even to suspect that the children s tale was in brilliant ways coded to be read by adults and was in fact an English classic, a universally acclaimed intellectual tour de force and what might be described as a psychological/anthropological dissection of Victorian England. It seems not to have occurred to me that the child-Alice of drawing rooms, servants, tea and crumpets and chess, was of a distinctly different background than my own. I must have been the ideal reader: credulous, unjudging, eager, thrilled. I knew only that I believed in Alice, absolutely.
Joyce Carol Oates
TheAlicesare the greatest nonsense ever written, and far greater, in my view, than most sense.
Philip Pullman"

Book Description:

'So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible' Alice in Wonderland

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0141199687
• ISBN 13: 9780141199689
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256