Fictional landscape in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Abstract

This dissertation shall concentrate specifically on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in an attempt to expose the narrative techniques which make this work of Children's literature so intriguing. In an endeavour to comprehend the way in which the fictional landscape is being constructed, this dissertation takes on the task of exploring the fictional world, the fictional beings and the discourse of these beings. The aim of the first chapter is to try and outline the context in which this book was written and to give a general overview of the way the child and childhood was perceived at the time. A general analysis of the book, delineating the main focus of the dissertation, follows. The conclusion of this chapter is that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been a timeless, revolutionary work for children's literature that has shaped a new approach to the child's involvement within the work. The second chapter endeavours to explain the way the fictional world has been constructed and later destroyed. Particular emphasis is placed on Alice's involvement in both the creation and destruction of Wonderland. This chapter also focuses on uncovering the fantastic within the fictional construct. In the following chapter, the creatures of Wonderland are taken as representatives of the world, and their fantastic characteristics examined, linking them to the construct discussed in chapter two. This is followed by the fourth chapter, which ventures to link the nonsensical discourse to the notion of the fantastical and the fictional described in the previous chapters. The concluding chapter shows how the narrative techniques of the text seem to be inscribed within the main character and the text itself. In conclusion, this dissertation attempts to analyse the way the above mentioned constituents, that is: the world, the beings and the discourse, are being manipulated in such a way as to destroy that which holds them together - the fictional landscape.