Carolyn Sigler

Excerpts from heirs and parodists of Alice from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the intro suggests that Alice parodies declined after this in part because Alice was admitted to the canon, which doesn’t ring quite right to me; I suspect it’s more that parodies, in the twentieth century, regularly _target more contemporary works. Anyway, Alice’s Adventures drew rewriting both for being insufficiently didactic and for being too restrictive in the imaginative possibilities for girls; the late period also features Alice used in political satires. Victorian women writers “reconstructed an image of Alice more appropriate to their beliefs about women’s cultural power and authority,” and women writers appropriated Alice “to free her from the restrictions of Carroll’s highly conservative narratives.” Moreover, “[t]he invocation of the popular and widely disseminated images of both alice and Lewis Carroll also provided one means for unknown female writers to authorize themselves in the growing literary marketplace of the late nineteenth century. In particular, these Alice revisions illustrate the transition—especially important in the emergence of women writers—from private to public discourse: the transformation of private occasional writing for a particular child to a public text for popular consumption.”… (more)