Friday, August 17, 2012

Alice in Wonderland (Norton Critical Edition)


2012 Book 119: Alice in Wonderland Norton Critical Edition, by Lewis Carroll (8/5/2012)

Reason for Reading: Coursera Fantasy and Science Fiction course

My Review 
This NCE contains Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark. I was pleased with the footnotes, which were helpful in clarifying many of Carroll's jokes. The critical information included some interesting biographies/diaries of Dodgson (Carroll), as well as a few critical essays. I was disappointed in these because although they were mostly good, the editor clearly has some negative feelings about Dodgson's morals and included many unnecessary Freudian-finger-pointing passages. If I were younger or more impressionable, I'd have been left with a very negative view of Dodgson indeed! Because of these attempts at manipulating the readers' good opinions of Dodgson, I wish I had gotten The Annotated Alice instead.

Note about the stories themselves: These were a re-read for me. Although I love Alice and really enjoyed reading the stories with footnotes (I understood them a lot better this time around!), I tend to prefer books with a little more plot development. Scandalous, I know, but what can I say?

No comments:

Post a Comment

What do you think? I love getting comments!