Modernism in Wonderland

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.

• 1. Introduction: Twentieth-Century Wonderlands: Michelle Witen, Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany2. ‘Speak in French when you can’t think of the English’: Carroll’s French and Mallarmé’s English: Alexandra Lukes, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland3. T. S. Eliot's Adventures in Wonderland: John D. Morgenstern, Emory University, USA4. Fantastic Surrealism: The Influence of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland on transition Magazine's American Surrealist Literary Experiments (1927–38): Céline Mansanti, University of Picardie Jules Verne, France5. Alice and the Expansion of the American West: Modernism, the Northern Pacific Railroad's Wonderland Route, and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: Michelle E. Moore, College of Dupage, USA6. 'Open Alice's Door': Lewis Carroll’s Influence on Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath: Jessica R. McCort, Point Park University, USA7. Becoming a Child: Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf's Poetics of Fluidity and Permanence: Teresa Prudente, University of Turin, Italy8. Reeling and Writhing in Benjamin's Arcades: The Curious Case of the Girl who Wasn't There: Lisa Mullen, University of Cambridge, UK9. 'These tautomeric changes': The Figures of Alice and Humpty Dumpty in the Work of W. H. Auden: Allan Pero, University of Western Ontario, Canada10. Nightmares of History: Modernism and Colonialism in Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges: David Conlon, Maynooth University, Ireland11. 'Sentence First Verdict Afterwards': Carroll, Nabokov and the Fragmented Body: Yaeli Greenblatt, Bar-Ilan University, Israel12. 'You're nothing but a pack of cards!': Carrollian Intertextuality and the Detective Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers: Ann Martin, University of Saskatchewan, Canada13. ‘The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’; or '“Alice” on the Stage': James Williams, University of York, UK14. Wasting Timelessness: Lewis Carroll, Flann O'Brien and Modernist Temporality: Paul Fagan, Maynooth University, Ireland

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.