The Acoustics of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll's Alice Tales

Abstract

This article explores how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's fantasies about Alice's adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass (1865, 1871), published under the pen-name Lewis Carroll, renewed the genre of children's literature by turning the vocal play of literary nonsense into the organising principle of child-centric, non-didactic, ludic narratives. 1 It shows how his language games strategically undermine tyrannical ideological structures, whether in the form of discursive ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 80), the institution of monarchy, the adult–child hierarchy maintained by a pedagogy of fear, or speciesist supremacy of human over animal.