Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Carroll, Lewis

Résumé :
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 disordered 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. Original and experimental, the Alice books give readers a window on both child and adult worlds. This is the most comprehensively annotated edition available and includes the manuscript version of Alice's Adventures Under Ground and Carroll's 1887 essay Alice on the Stage.

Biographie:
Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Revd Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, he was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, and where he spent the rest of his life. He wrote numerous satirical pamphlets on Oxford politics, including Notes by an Oxford Chiel (1874), and works on logic such as Euclid and His Modern Rivals and Symbolic Logic (1896). He also became a pioneering amateur portrait photographer, specializing in Victorian celebrities and children. Though Dodgson never married, children were the main interest in his life. After the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), both of which were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of his college, he became the most famous children's writer of the day. In addition to his two nonsense classics, he also published several books of nonsense verse, including Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1896), The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and Rhyme? And Reason? (1882). numerous books of puzzles and games such as The Game of Logic (1887). and towards the close of his life, a long children's novel in two parts, Sylvie and Bruno (1889,1893). He died in 1898. Hugh Haughton is a senior lecturer at the University of York. He has edited Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka (1985). The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (1988), Rudyard Kipling's Wee Willies Winkie (1988) and co-edited, with Adam Philips, John Clare in Context (1994).