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Alice in wonderland critical essays
Alice in wonderland critical essays
Alice in wonderland critical essays
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Aside from the very obvious madness and chaos of the scene, there is also a very stark example of the dream logic displayed in other parts of the story. There is also a sense of the feelings of loneliness. Alice is the only one that seems upset about the unfairness of the situation, especially when she grows back to her full size and everyone turns on her. This shows the separation she has from the other characters in terms of their state of mind. This is also where another aspect of the dream logic comes into play. Alice becomes the center of attention during the trial. When Alice grows back to her normal size, she draws all the attention to herself, the Knave all but forgotten in the chaos. When she was small, the King’s claim of “justice” is the absolute authority of a monarchy-based government. In a monarchy, all the power lies within the royal family. Alice’s size makes the King and his court feel threatened and orders that “All persons more than a mile high [are] to leave the court.” As Alice continues to grow, she becomes more aware of the absurdity and unfairness of the situation and more willing to speak out. When the Queen makes the ridiculously unfair declaration “Sentence first – verdict afterwards,” Alice replies with “Stuff and nonsense!” which causes the card soldiers to fly up in her face in an attack. The scene ends when Alice dismisses the King, Queen, and their court as “nothing but a pack of cards!” The cards continue to fly at her violently as she wakes up from her dream. This is yet another aspect of dream logic. When something sudden and frightening happens in a dream, it often wakes up the dreamer. It is Alice’s realizations that give her power o...
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Bush, Brady. Making Sense of Nonsense: A Literary Analysis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. N.p.: n.p., 26 Apr. 2004. PDF.
Carroll, Lewis, and Helen Oxenbury. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 1999. Print.
Keenlyside, Perry. "CARROLL, L.: Alice' S Adventures in Wonderland (Abridged)." CARROLL, L.: Alice' S Adventures in Wonderland. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 May 2014.
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Soder, Samantha. Parody and Nonsense Poems in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. N.p.: Viewpoints, Sept. 2010. PDF.
...ow this dream, once big and important is turned into a merely bothersome thought. This shows how the poet is no longer inspired to achieve this dream. Moreover, the phrase ‘I’m folding up my little dreams tonight, within my heart’ further describes her desperation (7). The act of folding describes her urge to make the dream disappear and tuck it out of her sight. This obviously shows how she does not want to confront it any longer.
Alice’s failure to understand the “native” culture, and her insistence on imposing her own norms and values ultimately culminates in a life-threatening situation.” (Binova “Underground Alice:” the politics of wonderland). Alice is the colonised in the situation with the Queen of Hearts. When she is introduced to the Queen her evil nature is revealed as she orders “Off with her head!” (Carroll 96). However, she is contrasted to Alice’s good nature while she shouts “Nonsense!” ( Carrol 96). The theme of chaos and confusion is brought forward as they play croquet all at once with noises all around and even in the court where everyone is expected to be civil. Although the Queen, as a character reinforces adulthood, subversion emerges again by Alice standing up for herself at this time. Nearing the end of her dream, she stands up against the Queen at court but it dream ends without a resolution. Maria Lassen-Seger says in ( “Subversion of Authority”: In “Alice’s Adventures of Wonderland”), “the relationship between the child and the adult is an impossible power relation in which the child is marginalised and considered powerless, thus, the adults suggest in their books what a child ought to be, what values and images it should accept.” The Queen at this point in the dream would have been the
Alice in Wonderland starts when Alice “sees” a rabbit exclaiming it was going to be late. When Alice starts dreaming about the Wonderland it may have been a little strange, but she ends up realizing that it helps with her problems in the real world.
In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Jane uses the novel to show the common day romance of the time period. In the novel, Elizabeth Bennet, a sophisticated, lively girl manages to change Mr. Darcy, a cocky, stubborn man into a person who is head over heels in love. Although it takes her some time, Elizabeth is able to change the way Mr. Darcy feels about love in general and causes him to act differently then he has ever done before. Mr. Darcy’s self- discovery in response to Elizabeth Bennet’s blunt honestly allows him to re-evaluate his approach to love.
To every protagonist in a novel, there has to be an antagonist that presents a perplexing challenge. Clive Staples Lewis is profoundly known for his successful children’s book series The Chronicles of Narnia, especially The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which had a popular plot for an undermined war between the White Witch named Jadis, the friendly lion Aslan, and the “Talking Beast” of Narnia (Bloom 25).
Alice Walker's Literature “Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence” -Alice Walker (Lewis n.pag) Walker is considered to be an African American novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and activist. Most of her literature is mostly from her personal experiences and is moral to a number of African Americans all over the world. Walker defines herself as a “womanist” which means “the prophetic voice concerned about the well-being of the entire African American community, male and female, adults and children.
Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize winning, internationally acclaimed author and poet who wrote the much studied short story “Every Day Use,” which was first published in 1973. Ms. Walker is originally from Putnam County, Georgia and was born on February 9, 1944, well before the civil rights movement in the US had begun and at a time when African Americans, particularly in the south endured hardships which would seem almost unimaginable to most young people today. Her family was one of limited means and by most accounts, lived a meager lifestyle as sharecroppers, struggling to get by and provide basic sustenance on a daily basis. By the early 1960s, she had become deeply interested in activism and civil rights not only for African Americans here in the US, but for anyone she viewed as oppressed no matter whom or where they are. Not coincidentally, her life experiences and philosophies are also recognizable in the characters of some of her works. “Every Day Use” (Walker) is one such story which contains many parallels to the author’s real life experiences and exposes the reader, at least in part, to Alice Walker’s background as well as some of her thoughts and views on a range of topics.
Connections between texts of different eras illuminate the dynamic nature of those central values that have continued to resonate within different contexts. A comparative study of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice and Fay Weldon’s 1984 epistolary Letters to Alice highlights the evolution of autonomy within marriage, shifting away from traditional Regency values of marriage to become more liberal in Weldon’s society, while also exploring the value of self-reflection through the reconsidering of past superficial values of their respective Regency and Post-Modern milieus.
Lewis Carroll's use of puns and riddles in Alice in Wonderland help set the theme and tone. He uses word play in the book to show a world of warped reality and massive confusion. He uses such play on words to reveal the underlying theme of growing up', but with such an unusual setting and ridiculous characters, there is need for some deep analyzing to show this theme. The book contains many examples of assonance and alliteration to add humor. Carroll also adds strange diction and extraordinary syntax to support the theme.
The madness of each individual is not realistic, but the idea that death, grievance, and revenge can drive someone to do things that seem to be mad or make them do things out of their nature. Overall, we see that the theme of madness has a significant impact on the conflicts and overall development of the play as well as the characters themselves and is successfully conveyed. Shakespeare developed a theme that tied the many important emotions and ideas together to make the play what it is. He used Ophelia’s grief and love, Hamlet’s wit and ruminative nature to convey a theme that could be related to more than the one character, and tie all of the conflicts and complications down to one cause.
other from Mr Darcy. Mr Darcy is a wealthy man who is a friend of Mr
Many have compared life to a journey over the course of which, one experiences many tumultuous changes and transitions. On this journey, the human body continually undergoes a developmental pattern of physical, mental, and social modifications. Even in the realm of literature, fictional characters inevitably follow this fate. In literature, the stage between childhood innocence and adulthood transforms characters, this is frequently referred to as "coming of age". Because all humans experience this transition, it establishes "coming of age" as a timeless universal literary theme. Among such "coming of age" novels is Lewis Carroll’s tale about a seven-year-old Victorian girl named Alice. In the novel, "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland", Alice falls into the curious world of Wonderland. Alice assuages and manages inter-conflicts, such as her identity. Through the confusion, experimentation, and uncertainties of the Wonderland between childhood and adulthood Alice realizes in her unconscious state that she is changing from simple child into a young woman.
In the poem “Alice” by Shel Silverstein, many interpretations can be made about how to be different than other people. To begin the author uses a hyperbole, when he states “and she grew so tall\ down she shrank so small” (Silverstein 2.) The author might have used these to give a sense of risk-taking in the text to show that she actually was gargantuan after she drank the drink called drink me, then shrank down after she ate from the plate called taste me. And at the end of the poem, Shel wrote “ and so she changed, while other folks tried nothin’ at all” (Silverstein 5-6.) This could be implied to our theme; Do lots in your life and take lots of risks, because it's better to do something than nothing at all.
a good mother and a good wife. The goal of women was to grow up to
Alice in Wonderland belongs to the nonsense genre, and even if most of what happens to Alice is quite illogical, the main character is not. “The Alice books are, above all, about growing up” (Kincaid, page 93); indeed, Alice starts her journey as a scared little girl, however, at the end of what we discover to be just a dream, she has entered the adolescence phase with a new way to approach the mentally exhausting and queer Wonderland. It is important to consider the whole story when analyzing the growth of the character, because the meaning of an event or a sentence is more likely to mean what it truly looks like rather than an explanation regarding subconscious and Freudian interpretations. Morton states “that the books should possess any unity of purpose seems on the surface unlikely” (Morton, page 509), but it’s better to consider the disconnected narrative and the main character separately, since the girl doesn’t belong to Wonderland, which is, as Morton says, with no intrinsic unity. Whereas, there are a few key turning points where it is possible to see how Alice is changing, something that is visible throughout her journey. Carroll wants to tell the story of a girl who has to become braver in order to contend with challenges like the pool made by her own tears, or assertive characters, like the Queen.