Books about Alice in Wonderland

This is a book that every Alice fan should own! It is an annotated single-volume edition, which contains the complete text of both "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass", including the original Tenniel illustrations.

Gardner's annotations in the margins of the pages explain many of the meanings hidden in Lewis Carroll's books. I own a copy myself (not this version but the one from september 1998 which can still be bought too if you click here), and I consider it to be the Bible for Alice lovers!

This new volume combines the notes of Gardner's "The Annotated Alice" (1960) and the update "More Annotated Alice (1990)", as well as additional new discoveries and updates drawn from Gardner's encyclopedic knowledge of the texts.

It is illustrated with John Tenniel's original pictures along with many recently discovered Tenniel pencil sketches.

Richard Kelly combines Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Readers are thus able to trace the literary revisions, and to compare Carroll's own illustrations in the original with the Tenniel illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The book encapsulates the major theories of what the book means, and it provides photographs that Carroll took and excerpts from his diaries and letters; it also offers examples of early reviews, imitations, parodies, and recollections of the author.

Dr. Bernard M. Patten provides a chapter-by-chapter skeleton key to Alice, which meticulously demonstrates how its various episodes reveal Dodgson's profound knowledge of the rules of clear thinking, informal and formal logic, symbolic logic, and human nature.

The title of this book may be somewhat misleading: it is not only about the different ways Alice has been interpreted by artists. The book also analyzes the representation that Lewis Carroll gave to each of the events in the story and the characters, and analyses some of Carroll's word play.

It contains a selection of illustrations from some non-English editions, and is actually not intended for people who seriously want to study the various illustrators of Alice.

The book has a very artistic layout, with varying fonts and font sizes, which can be somewhat overwhelming.

The book describes the childhood of Alice Liddell and considers the connection between Alice Liddell, the Alice from the book and Dodgson/Carroll by means of anecdotes, historical information on childhood life in Victorian England, family trees for Alice, Dodgson, and Queen Victoria, biographical details, descriptions of the Oxford setting (including a walking tour), photos, etc.. The book also contains games and puzzles invented by Dodgson.

Although this book is obviously written for children (judging to the tone and style of writing), it manages to provide much information about the author of the Alice books and his relationship with Alice Liddell and her sisters, along with nicely rendered pictures and a good number of Dodgson's photographs.

Although the 'story' given in the book has a few fictionalized moments, on the whole it is accurate and does not shy away from the fact that Dodgson's relationship with Alice was rather sad and didn't have a happy ending.

This book discusses how Lewis Carroll and Alice have expanded over time into cultural myths and icons.

Through an analysis of texts about them, it becomes clear what the contemporary role and meanings of these cultural icons are, and how they have come to symbolize many different things to many different people.

Brooker shows us the ways in which they have been used and adapted, which includes cartoons, movies, computer games, heritage sites, illustrations, theatrical performances, toys and other products, fan clubs, and much more.

This "companion" to the Alice books offers an explanation of the characters and situations that fill their pages and explains how they relate to the life and experiences of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

The book is set up like a dictionary, which enables you to look things up by keyword.

Ronald Reichertz analyses the Alice books in the context of children's literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and argues that Carroll's originality was the result of a fusion of his narrative imagination and formal and thematic features from earlier children's literature.

The book includes discussions of the didactic and nursery rhyme verse traditionally addressed by Carroll's critics while adding and elaborating connections established within and against the continuum of English-language children's literature.

With many examples from children's literature Reichertz demonstrates that the Alice books are infused with conventions of and allusions to earlier works and identifies precursors of Carroll's upside-down, looking-glass, and dream vision worlds.

Key passages from related books are reprinted in the appendices, making available many hard-to-find examples of early children's literature.

In many ways, the worlds Alice encounters are exaggerated versions of the evolving modern society that many Victorians feared.

In chapters that explore the historical context, critical reception and interpretation of the Alice books, Rackin examines how Carroll used fantasy and "nonsense" to mirror the frightening reality of a world transformed by mechanization, changing class relations, capitalism, and religious doubt.

Rackin explains that the story deals with our desperate search for meaning; we create for ourselves a system of rules that helps us structure the world which is in reality a total chaos. If we didn't live by our rules we would become as mad as the Wonderland creatures.

The book specifically deals with the following topics: "The Alice Books and Lewis Carroll's World" / "The Importance of the Alice Books and the Search for Their Meaning" / "Critical Reception of the Alice Books" / "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: An Underground Journey to the End of Night" / "Through the Looking-Glass: Alice Becomes an I" / "Blessed Rage: The Alices and the Modern Quest for Order" / "Laughing and Grief: What's So Funny about the Alices?" / ""And here I must leave you": Death, Love, and the White Knight's Farewell".

Holbrook draws on Carroll's own letters, as well as the work of 20th-century psychoanalysts, to examine what the books reveal about the author's own desires and conflicts and his relationships with those around him.

The book includes Included four photographs taken by Carroll himself and two of his drawings.

Available alternatives:
Book
Kindle edition


“Alice in Wonderland and philosophy” is a book that contains 14 essays by different authors, that all deal with certain philosophic questions, and try to explain them with, or relate them to, passages of the Alice in Wonderland stories.

Some authors have good knowledge of the ‘Alice’ books, and explain parts of the story by relating them to philosophical problems. Others seem to have done it the other way around: they wrote their essay, using a philosophical issue as their starting point, and then appeared to have looked up some matching parts in the books to illustrate the issue.

Don’t expect thorough analyses and scholarly language, but easily readable essays that introduce you to the questions philosophers like Locke, Socrates, Plato and Nietzsche dealt with. Read it for your enjoyment, if you have some interest in philosophy and the Alice in Wonderland books. Or, if you are a student looking for inspiration for a thesis or school paper, use it as a starting point for your own philosophical analysis of the ‘Alice’ books.

This book is about the many translations that were made of Alice in Wonderland.

CliffsNotes for students; Carroll's story with some annotations, also including handy review exercises and additional resources.

Literary criticism and analysis. This e-doc contains: plot summary; character analysis; author biography; an overview of the novel's themes, style, and historical context; a compendium of in-depth critical material; study questions; suggestions for further reading; and much more.