Lewis Carroll, Art Director: Recovering the Design and Production Rationales for Victorian Editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (original) (raw)
Related papers
From Street Girl to Roman Goddess: The Creation of Multiple Visual Alices from 1858 to 1872
2015
Victorian representations of childhood are found in a wide variety of cultural texts, from literary descriptions to visual images. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865) is no different in this sense. However, Alice’s character is one of the first of its kind to behave as a cross-media figure, thus becoming a fantasy literature heroine as well as a popular cultural icon. This paper focuses on Alice’s artistic representations in three forms: (a) Lewis Carroll’s verbal art; (b) the photographic prints of the “real” Alice Liddell taken in 1858 and 1872 by Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron respectively; and (c) the visual illustrations by Carroll and by John Tenniel (1864 and 1865, respectively). The aim of the paper is to discuss whether Alice was ever a “real” Victorian girl, by examining her multiple representations in the given corpus. It also aims at analysing Alice’s visual characteristics in order to reveal Alice as a visual concept of her times. Keywords: fantasy literature, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustration, photography, cross-media, visual culture, Julia Margaret Cameron Vom Straßenmädchen bis hin zur römischen Göttin: Entstehung zahlreicher visueller Alice-Gestalten im Zeitraum von 1858 bis 1872 Viktorianische Kindheitsdarstellungen sind in diversen kulturellen Texten vorzufinden, und zwar im Rahmen unterschiedlicher verbaler und visueller Darstellungsformen – von literarischen Beschreibungen bis hin zu autonomen Bildern. Das Werk von Lewis Carroll Alice im Wunderland (1865) stellt in diesem Sinne keine Ausnahme dar. Dennoch ist Alice eine der ersten Gestalten, die sich zu einer intermedialen Figur entwickelte, um dabei sowohl zur Heldin der fantastischen Literatur als auch zur Ikone der Popkultur zu werden. Im Beitrag werden drei Formen der künstlerischen Darstellung von Alice besprochen: (a) die verbale Form von Lewis Carroll, (b) die fotografischen Abbildungen der ‚wahren‘ Alice, Alice Liddell, die Carroll 1858 und Julia Margaret Cameron 1872 hergestellt haben, sowie (c) die Illustrationen von Lewis Carroll (1864) und John Tenniel (1865). Anhand der Auseinandersetzung mit der mehrfachen Darstellung von Alice im Rahmen des oben angeführten Korpus möchte man feststellen, ob Carrolls Heldin jemals ein ‚echtes‘ viktorianisches Mädchen war. Darüber hinaus werden im Beitrag auch die visuellen Merkmale der Alice-Gestalt analysiert, um Alice als ein aus jener Zeit stammendes visuelles Konzept darzustellen. Schlüsselwörter: fantastische Literatur, Alice im Wunderland, Illustration, Fotografie, Intermedialität, visuelle Kultur, Julia Margaret Cameron
“They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care”: Lewis Carroll Studies, 2004–2017
Dickens Studies Annual, 2018
Recorded in this essay is the sweep of Lewis Carroll scholarship covering 2004–2017. New Primary Works; Critical, Annotated or Notable Editions; Reference Works; Biographies; Journals and Websites; Book-length Studies; Collections of Essays; and Selected Journal Essays and Book Chapters are covered. During the period discussed, diverse interest in Lewis Carroll and his works increased steadily and was extensive, more in evidence than for many if not most Victorian writers. The topics of interest related to this multitalented man—literature, photography, biography, mathematics and logic, Victorian cultural studies and more, and seen from many critical and thematic perspectives—have become increasingly broad and accepted as worthy of study of a major figure, and his Alice books established as major texts of world literature.
In my book L’esthétique du jeu dans les Alice de Lewis Carroll (The Aesthetics of Play in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books), I have argued that Carroll’s own adaptation of Wonderland for children “aged from nought to five,” that is to say The Nursery Alice, so strictly constrains the implied reader’s participation that she cannot playfully counter-interpellate the text (thus referring to Judith Butler’s theory of subjection, subjectification and counter-interpellation). In other words, I have shown that the reader of The Nursery Alice cannot indulge in what Roger Caillois calls “paidia,” the impulsive manifestation of a play instinct, but can only adhere to “ludus,” the need to conform to rules. Contrariwise, as the Tweedle brothers would say, even if the 1865 Alice tries to limit the implied reader’s role, she can actively counter-interpellate the text, and play with and against its rules. For this presentation, I’d like to focus on the reader’s cooperation with the book-as-object, and reveal how the tension between subjection and agency characterizes both Carroll and Tenniel’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and paper engineering artist Robert Sabuda’s adaptation of this classic (2003). As Mou-Lan Wong has convincingly suggested, the reader is actively involved when reading the original Alice books, thereby, I would add, becoming a playful reader. The page-turning mechanism is exploited to the maximum, so much so that turning the pages does not merely mean getting access to the rest of the tale, but actually creating some of the Wonderland characters (145) and ultimately creating Wonderland (144). Similarly, when Sabuda discusses the creation of his pop-up books, he notes that the tension between subjection and agency lies at the core of his work: he wants to make “the paper listen and obey” (9) while knowing at the same time that “the paper will do what it wants to do” (10). My talk will then address the following question: is the reader of Sabuda’s Alice as playfully involved in the book as the reader of Carroll and Tenniel’s version is? or does the (too?) intricate pop-up device actually plan the reader’s role so much that her intervention is drastically limited? In other words, can Sabuda’s reader indulge in what Caillois calls “paidia” while at the same time recognizing the “ludic” rules of the pop-up game, or is she forced to abide by these rules without counter-interpellating them, consequently relinquishing any chance of being a playful reader?
The Fantastic and the Feminine Sublime of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
2022
The study presents a close analysis of the immersive yet disorienting textual space of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in order to explore its sublime aesthetics. As a piece of portal fantasy, the work enables readers to enter into the transcendent sphere of uncontrolled imagination via the adventures of the prophetic Dream Child, eliciting what David Sandner has defined as both a reformulation and an extension of the Romantic sublime: the fantastic sublime. A more favourable attitude towards the elusiveness of meaning in the text lies in Barbara Claire Freeman’s feminine sublime, which prefers the excessive and unrepresentable to exclusion and control.
2019
How do the look and feel of the book impact the markets for and the meanings of the text? Text and illustrations are mutable content that is framed and commodified by the book's materiality. The book's materiality is the most visible yet under-researched means by which publishers target audiences and manufacture meaning. Art direction is the strategic, creative concept for how the look and feel of the book attract consumers and engage readers. That concept is articulated with the book's design and production values (e.g. format, layout, ink, paper, binding). This dissertation documents, historicizes and interrogates how the book's materiality impacts, first, the book-consumer relationship and, second, the text-reader relationship. This case study of British and American English-language editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865-2015) traces the title's 'material evolution' (i.e. the successive materialities of a title that is published in multiple editions). The three-tiered framework for studying material evolution builds on: industrial printing and binding order forms and analytical bibliography to document copies; publishing history case studies and book history models to historicize multiple editions of a single title; publishing industry practice and literary theories to interrogate commercial rationales and meaning-making processes. This dissertation begins by mining book scholarship (bibliography, book history, publishing history) for the field's engagement with materiality and literary theories (genre theory, semiotics, readerresponse theory, paratext) for their constructs of authorship, text, readership and work. It then examines 46 editions of Alice individually. It recovers author Lewis Carroll as an art director who worked with London publisher Macmillan to package Alice in five editions. Subsequent remaindered, pirated and posthumous editions introduced Alice to America and variously adopted, adapted and deviated from Carroll's fairy-tale aesthetics. Once Alice entered the public domain, publishers more aggressively and frequently used art direction to diversify the title across ages (e.g. children, adults, young adults) and categories (e.g. fantasy, film tie-in, satire, graphic novel). This dissertation unpacks how and why publishers manipulate materiality, and the impacts it has on consumers' discovery and acquisition of the book and the meanings that readers make of the text.