Modernism in Wonderland - (Historicizing Modernism) by John D Morgenstern & Michelle Witen (Paperback)

About the Book

"Retracing the steps of a surprising array of twentieth-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll's fictions and discovered there the quintessence of their own modernity, this book demonstrates that Carroll's influence extended far beyond literary style, pervading all aspects of modern life from commercial culture to politics, from philosophy to the new physics. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism"--

Book Synopsis

Retracing the steps of a surprising array of 20th-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll's fictions, this book demonstrates the full extent of Carroll's legacy in literary modernism. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental.

The collection's chapters look beyond literary style to show how Carroll's writings had a far-reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics and philosophy. This book shows us the Alicewe recognize from Carroll's novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.

Review Quotes

With verve and imagination, Witen and Morgenstern have brought together an eclectic and stimulating new set of essays on Carroll's modernist afterlives. Who could resist a tea-party (or should that be a caucus race?) at which such "older children" - Joyce and Flann O'Brien, Woolf and Kate Chopin, Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers, Walter Benjamin and Auden, Borges, Marquez, and Nabokov, Plath and Elizabeth Bishop - are gathered? When James Joyce called Jung and Freud Tweedledum and Tweedledee, he was proving Carroll's immense capacity for explaining the modern world. The essays in this collection confirm this over and over again. They expel the idea that Modernism was a rejection of Victorian culture; that Carroll's Alice books could be perceived as peripheral to the development of 20th Century Literature. And they affirm that modernist writers drew on Carroll because he revealed how threatening the regimes of reason, knowledge, and social ritual could be; and because he showed ways of contesting those regimes. There's glory for you.
Finn Fordham, Professor of 20th Century Literature, Royal Holloway University of London, UK

About the Author

Michelle Witen is Junior Professor of English and Irish Literature at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany and Director of the EUF Centre for Irish Studies. She is the author of James Joyce and Absolute Music (Bloomsbury 2018) and co-editor of the special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on "Joyce and the Nonhuman" (2020/21).
John D. Morgenstern is a scholar of 20th-century literature and the arts who has taught in England, Germany, and the United States. He now serves as an associate librarian at Emory University. John is the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts (2016) and the founding editor of The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual.