Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Found There (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Carroll, Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141439769 ISBN 13: 9780141439761

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2003

Synopsis

'A work of glorious intelligence and literary devices . . . Nonsense becomes a form of higher sense' Malcolm Bradbury

'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' to entertain a young girl. 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 disordered tea-party and a seven-year-old girl is made Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling word play, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for lost childhood.

Edited with an Introduction and notes by Hugh Haughton

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

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: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0141439769
• ISBN 13: 9780141439761
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448
• Editor: Haughton Hugh
• Illustrator: Tenniel John