Literary Wonderlands

A glorious collection that delves deep into the inception, influences, and literary and historical underpinnings of nearly 100 of our most beloved fictional realms. Literary Wonderlands is a thoroughly researched, wonderfully written, and beautifully produced book that spans four thousand years of creative endeavor. From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work. Each piece includes a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae." Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction. Laura Miller is the book's general editor. Co-founder of Salon.com, where she worked as an editor and writer for 20 years, she is currently a books and culture columnist at Slate. A journalist and a critic, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the "Last Word" column for two years. She is the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia and editor of the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors.

Imaginary worlds have captivated readers since the first works of literature. Lovingly researched and beautifully produced, Literary Wonderlands explores the timeless , captivating features of literature's greatest fictional worlds and the minds that created them. The book is comprised of nearly 100 sections, each of which details the plot of a famous fantasy world, the historical circumstances that surrounded its production , the author's inspiration, and the place it holds in the public imagination. Roaming from classic tales including C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials , t his truly global collection chronicles over two thousand years of literary creation. Accompanied by stunning visuals that elucidate the production of each wor k, Literary Wonderlands is a n enchanting read for anyone who has ever been transported to another place through the power of the written word

Since the first translations of Lewis Carroll's Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese life and popular culture. The books have been translated into Japanese more than 500 times, resulting in more editions of these works in Japanese than any other language except English. Generations of Japanese children learned English from textbooks containing Alice excerpts. Japan's internationally famous fashion vogue, Lolita, merges Alice with French Rococo style. In Japan Alice is everywhere--in manga, literature, fine art, live-action film and television shows, anime, video games, clothing, restaurants, and household goods consumed by people of all ages and genders. In Alice in Japanese Wonderlands, Amanda Kennell traverses the breadth of Alice's Japanese media environment, starting in 1899 and continuing through 60s psychedelia and 70s intellectual fads to the present, showing how a set of nineteenth-century British children's books became a vital element in Japanese popular culture. Using Japan's myriad adaptations to investigate how this modern media landscape developed, Kennell reveals how Alice connects different fields of cultural production and builds cohesion out of otherwise disparate media, artists, and consumers. The first sustained examination of Japanese Alice adaptations, her work probes the meaning of Alice in Wonderland as it was adapted by a cast of characters that includes the "father of the Japanese short story," Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; the renowned pop artist Yayoi Kusama; and the best-selling manga collective CLAMP. While some may deride adaptive activities as mere copying, the form Alice takes in Japan today clearly reflects domestic considerations and creativity, not the desire to imitate. By engaging with studies of adaptation, literature, film, media, and popular culture, Kennell uses Japan's proliferation of Alices to explore both Alice and the Japanese media environment.

A glorious collection that delves deep into the inception, influences, and literary and historical underpinnings of nearly 100 of our most beloved fictional realms. Please note that the ebook does not contain images. Literary Wonderlands is a thoroughly researched, wonderfully written, and beautifully produced book that spans two thousand years of creative endeavor. From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work. Each piece includes a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae." Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction. Laura Miller is the book's general editor. Co-founder of Salon.com, where she worked as an editor and writer for 20 years, she is currently a books and culture columnist at Slate. A journalist and a critic, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the "Last Word" column for two years. She is the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia and editor of the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors.

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 19th-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.

Amazing Stories, the home of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, publisher of the first stories of Ursula K. Leguin and Isaac Asimov, is back in print after an absence of more than a decade! This relaunch of the iconic first science fiction magazine is packed full of exciting science fiction, fantasy, and articles, all in a beautiful package featuring eye-catching illustrations and cartoons. The Amazing Stories Fall 2018 issue (the 614th issue since 1926) includes work by: Robert Silverberg Jack Clemons Allen Steele Lawrence Watt-Evans Rudy Rucker Dave Creek Shirley Meier Kameron Hurley Julie Czerneda Paul Levinson Drew Hayden Taylor Gary Dalkin Steve Fahnestalk Continuing a 92-year history - Amazing Stories returns as a print and digital publication!

Introduction: Fantastic Bullets -- I Am Nubia: Superhero Comics and the Paradigm of the Fantasy-Act -- Can the Black Superhero Be? -- Erotic Fantasy-Acts: The Art of Desire -- Conclusion: On Becoming Fantastical.

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Every thing s got a moral, if only you can find it . Lewis Carroll 1865. In 2015, the first edition of Alice in Wonderland will have its 150th anniversary. The novel as well as its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There have been read by people of all ages and all origins ever since. Due to the widespread success of the literary work, Lewis Carroll s novels have not only been illustrated by hundreds of artists, but also frequently adapted for film, theatre, opera, music, and other forms of art. Among these numerous adaptations are two motion pictures produced by the Walt Disney Company, which is known for warm-hearted movies for audiences of all ages. The relationship between Alice in Wonderland and Walt Disney even dates back to 1923 when he founded the famous film studio due to a distribution contract for his first completed short film called Alice s Wonderland. This thesis, however, focuses on the Disney adaptation from 1951 a 2-D cartoon animation as well as the most recent film adaptation from 2010 a combination of live-action film and computer-generated animation. Thus, the main part of this thesis constitutes a comparative analysis of both adaptations regarding the following aspects: the evolution of the visualisations, the different characters of the heroine Alice, the influences of Walt Disney and Tim Burton on the story lines and the styles of the adaptations, and the responses to both films. Thereby, the following research questions should be answered: What are the specificities of Carroll s novels? Why did it attract so many filmmakers? Why did both adaptations employ the medium of animation? Did the medium get implemented successfully? How did Walt Disney and Tim Burton affect the story lines and the styles of the adaptations? How did the heroine s character change under their influence? How did the audiences react to the adaptations? What are the reasons for that? The first theoretical part hence starts with a description of the literary model, which aims at defining the novels specificities respectively the essence Carroll tried to convey. Chapter 2 outlines the most important issues of today s adaptation discourse, since the theory of adaptation serves as the theoretical basis for the comparative analysis. In chapter 3, an overview of the medium of animation will be given, including the medium s possibilities and challenges as well as its techniques. With [...]

First published in 1865, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told to Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boating trip in July of 1862. The novel follows Alice down a rabbit-hole and into a surreal world of strange and wonderful characters who constantly turn everything upside-down with their mind-boggling logic and word play, and their fantastic parodies. Carroll's fable illustrates his masterful ability to weave logic with nonsense in a tale that continues to delight all ages. While this great classic is widely available, the Broadview edition is unique. Richard Kelly combines Alice's Adventures in Wonderland not with the later (and largely distinct) work Through the Looking Glass but rather with Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Lewis Carroll's first version of the story. Readers are thus able to trace the literary revisions, and to compare Caroll's own illustrations in the original with the famous John Tenniel illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Among the many other materials included in the Broadview Literary Texts edition are a substantial selection of early reviews, selections from Carroll's diaries and correspondence, Carroll's early nonsense poems, and the originals of the poems parodied in his text.

The aim of the following dissertation is an analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in regard to the uncanny and its relation to language. For the purpose of the study on the psychoanalytical concept of the uncanny in connection with linguistic theory, the most important theories have been evaluated in the first chapter of the dissertation, titled “The Concept of the Uncanny and its Relation to Language”. Afterwards the chapter “The Uncanny and Language in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass” applies the acquired theoretical framework to the two selected texts in order to understand the different ways in which Carroll manipulates language in order to create an uncanny atmosphere.

This book examines the many reincarnations of Carroll’s texts, illuminating how the meaning of the original books has been re-negotiated through adaptations, appropriations, and transmediality. The volume is an edited collection of eighteen essays and is divided into three sections that examine the re-interpretations of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in literature, film, and other media (including the branches of commerce, music videos, videogames, and madness studies). This collection is an addition to the existing work on Alice in Wonderland and its sequels, adaptations, and appropriations, and helps readers to have a more comprehensive view of the extent to which the Alice story world is vast and always growing.

Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House. Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction. Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays—the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective “letter to a young poet”—add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside his prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.

A Study Guide for Charles Dodgson's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here.' The 'Alice' books are two of the most translated, most quoted, and best-known books in the world, but what exactly are they? Apparently delightful, innocent fantasies for children, they are also complex textures of mathematical, linguistic, and philosophical jokes. Alice's encounters with the White Rabbit, the Cheshire-Cat, the King and Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and many other extraordinary characters have made them masterpieces of carefree nonsense, yet they also appeal to adults on a quite different level. Layers of satire, allusion, and symbolism about Victorian culture and politics, as well as revelations about the intricate subconscious problems of their author, add to their fascination and make them impossible to classify. This new edition explores the phenomenal range of reference, and the paradoxical appeal of two of the most inventive books in world literature. It also includes an episode removed by Carroll from the proofs of Through the Looking-Glass, called 'The Wasp in a Wig'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

An investigation of identity formation in children's literature, this book brings together children’s literature and recent critical concerns with posthuman identity to argue that children’s fiction offers sophisticated interventions into debates about what it means to be human, and in particular about humanity’s relationship to animals and the natural world. In complicating questions of human identity, ecology, gender, and technology, Jaques engages with a multifaceted posthumanism to understand how philosophy can emerge from children's fantasy, disclosing how such fantasy can build upon earlier traditions to represent complex issues of humanness to younger audiences. Interrogating the place of the human through the non-human (whether animal or mechanical) leads this book to have interpretations that radically depart from the critical tradition, which, in its concerns with the socialization and representation of the child, has ignored larger epistemologies of humanness. The book considers canonical texts of children's literature alongside recent bestsellers and films, locating texts such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Pinocchio (1883) and the Alice books (1865, 1871) as important works in the evolution of posthuman ideas. This study provides radical new readings of children’s literature and demonstrates that the genre offers sophisticated interventions into the nature, boundaries and dominion of humanity.