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This chapter explores pornographic constructions of female sexual agency through the character of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. These films use the Alice narrative to play out fantasies of womanly sexual authority through humor and sadomasochism. These films constitute recuperative projects that rescue Alice from her pawn status and position her as object, subject, and author within the pornographic text. I demonstrate the ways in which cultural understandings of the Alice stories are used by pornographic filmmakers to depict Wonderlands as joyful fantasy spaces for re-visionings of the normative and for developing and directing a particular pornographic female sexual subjectivity.

In his famous photographs of children and in the Alice books, Lewis Carroll often displays a surprising willingness to jettison the solitary Child of Nature paradigm and explore instead the complex relationship that links children to adults, himself to his beloved child friends. Rather than single-mindedly insisting that a firm barrier separates young from old, Carroll frequently blurs this line, characterizing the child not as an untouched Other, but as a collaborator enmeshed in a complicated relationship with the adults who surround her. As in the case of the female children’s authors studied in Chapter 1, his work reveals a keen awareness of the fact that children are always already involved with (and influenced by) adults. But whereas they seem comfortably certain that children can nevertheless develop into creative agents who help shape their own life stories, Carroll remains unsure. He hopes that children can function as empowered collaborators, but—like Stevenson—he fears that the power imbalance inherent in the adult-child relationship ensures that all adults can offer children is a fraudulent illusion of reciprocity. Even his own cherished brand of nonsense literature, he suggests, can function as a form of coercion that pushy adults foist upon profoundly uninterested children.

Three contemporary works tell the story of a girl's journey through the labyrinth to retrieve her mother's baby from the goblins. Maurice Sendak's picture book Outside Over There (1981) and Jim Henson's film Labyrinth (1986) are framed as stories for children. Guillermo del Toro's film Pan's Labyrinth (2006) draws on the tropes of children's fiction to tell an adult story of the horrors of war. The hero Theseus strode through the Cretan labyrinth to find a child-eating monster. In these stories, the monster is a baby and the hero is a girl. This chapter asks why. Part 2.2 considers the nature of the labyrinth and significations of the mythic labyrinth. Part 2.3 summarizes the three labyrinth stories and draw connections with Wonderland's Alice. Part 2.4 explores the significance of the girl-child and connections between the feminine, the labyrinth, and the law. Part 2.5 considers the meanings of goblins while Part 2.6 looks at the labyrinth and desire.

Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan both originate from beloved British children’s literature. Both stories involve child protagonists that travel to a world of their imagination. Both films were scored by Oliver Wallace, who underscored dialog from authoritative characters in the same manner as recitative. Dream and celestial imagery in “The Second Star to the Right” is investigated as well as the tune’s relationship to Peter Pan’s leitmotif. The chapter also covers “You Can Fly” in terms of rhymed dialog, foreshadowing, dream imagery, escapism, and Mickey Mousing.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the aesthetics of the Victorian illustrated book were changing. The public desired artistic book illustration that could simulate the lifelike quality of photography. “Realism, Victorian Material Culture, and the Enduring Caricature Tradition” frames the realistic school of illustration, commonly referred to as the Sixties, with the Great Exhibition of 1851; this first ever world’s fair of culture and industry stimulated production of beautiful objects, including books with decorative bindings, culminating in a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue in a representational style (also referred to as realism or naturalism) in vogue from the 1850s–1870s. Foremost, this chapter examines how the creative vision of the caricaturists underpins the achievement of some Sixties artists, notably Fred Barnard and J. (James) Mahoney, who fleshed out inventive caricature designs to suit popular taste for the Household Edition of Dickens’s works. We witness this same kind of revision of the caricature tradition in Alice in Wonderland (1865). To appeal to middle-class consumers of the 1860s, John Tenniel refashioned Carroll’s caricature-style illustrations by adding domestic interiors and landscape details, realistically recreating Carroll’s social caricatures.

This chapter traces how Frances Hodgson Burnett and J. M. Barrie both participated in and resisted the creation of the emerging subgenre of children’s theatre. On the one hand, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Peter Pan drew large numbers of children into the playhouse, and turn-of-the-century commentators credited them with helping to establish the category of “children’s play” as a distinct dramatic genre. On the other hand, when we compare these two dramas to other productions which aimed to attract child playgoers during this time, it becomes evident that Burnett and Barrie were resisting the increasing pressure to cater shows specifically and exclusively to the young. Even as more and more critics began to insist that children needed their own specially simplified and sanitized shows, these playwrights stubbornly continued to include “adult” content in their dramas, clinging to the old pantomime tradition of trying to attract a mixed audience and resisting the idea that children needed to be shielded from such matters and addressed in very different terms from adults. Their plays thus provide a final piece of support for Gubar’s argument that Golden Age authors often resisted the growing pressure to conceive of the young as a race apart.

This chapter considers Lewis Carroll’s multifaceted relationship to the way images of Alice were generated in his readers’ minds, from her incarnation in the first imprint of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 to George Buckland’s dissolving view adaptation, staged at the Royal Polytechnic in 1876. As his private and published writings attest, the dynamics of literary mediation preoccupied and frustrated Carroll. His prefaces flirt with a technologically impossible immediacy, pressing against the material limits of the printed page in his earnest desire to communicate with his readers with a persistence that exemplifies Walter Benjamin’s familiar theory that certain art forms and, correspondingly, artists aspire to effects that ‘could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard’. It is striking therefore, that Carroll chose the medium of the dream as his organising motif for the Alice books, a state of consciousness which his contemporaries, such as Frances Power Cobbe, George Henry Lewes, William Carpenter, and James Sully, variously theorise as an infinite archive of remembered activities, including books read and images viewed, that momentarily emerge then dissolve in a timeless associative stream.

The conclusion looks forward from the Victorian illustrated book to the “graphic classics,” a form of modern popular culture that is arguably the heir of the Victorian illustrated book. Canonical texts adapted into graphic novel format are inheritors of the aesthetic conventions of caricature and realism, reshaped in a hyper-modern form to appeal to twenty-first-century readers. The chapter explores parallels between the serial and the comic book. It surveys graphic novel adaptations of nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels (e.g. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and original Victorian-themed graphic novels (e.g. Batman Noël). The conclusion focuses on two important Victorian illustrated books—Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865)—to demonstrate how graphic novel adaptation is reviving a genre that a century before recognized pictures play a central role in plot and character development. This chapter foregrounds author-illustrator Will Eisner, the father of the graphic novel and author-illustrator of Fagin the Jew (2003), for his direct challenge to a religious and ethnic stereotype that Dickens and Cruikshank develop in Oliver Twist and Du Maurier carries into Trilby.

This chapter focuses on the novel as a dollhouse filled with tiny women (Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Little Nell, and “little Esther Summerson”), which plays complicated games with size and mimesis. This discussion, which includes the odd and understudied genre of “dollhouse novels” and Freud’s work on the uncanny (another game played with the heroine’s perspective), sets up the key formal terms of the book. For Alice asks not only what the heroine is, and what she can be thinking, but exactly how big she is, and how she can survive an unreliable body in an ever-shifting world. In that way, after the careful realism of the epistolary novel or of The Golden Bowl, in these novels we reenter the fairy-tale chamber, cross the threshold into a darker form of curiosity, the world of dolls, of waxwork figures, of automatons, of “the wrong Alice.”

This chapter discusses a third heroine, Lewis Carroll's or Tim Burton's Alice. Burton's 2010 film, Alice in Wonderland, is a complexly allusive work, which cleverly stirs and shakes the memories both of Alice herself, within the fiction of the film, and of the audience, encouraging people to remember experiences from childhood. It turns out that Wonderland's real name is Underland. The chapter suggests that the film can also be seen as a kind of final katabasis too. By invoking a varied array of earlier texts, Burton puts the allusion marker of memory to uncannily effective use, demonstrating that the bonds between allusion and the uncanny can resonate within film, popular culture and genre fiction as well as within more classical and canonical texts.

This chapter discusses how the Alice in Wonderland prototype developed by Lewis Carroll became influential for writers and artists after 1945. It aligns its treatment of sexuality with what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht called the ‘frozen time’ of the Cold War era, showing how Australian painter Charles Blackman deployed representations of Alice to project a world in which time was reversed. This is linked to Blackman’s interest in Indigenous culture and to explorations of temporality in the work of English film director Nicolas Roeg. Similarly reflexive representations of time in playwright Jean Genet and film-maker Ingmar Bergman are counterpointed with the absurdist style of composer György Ligeti, whose opera Le Grand Macabre frames Cold War politics within a burlesque setting. This chapter concludes with an analysis of Vladimir Nabokov, also much influenced by Carroll, who in his later fictions seeks explicitly to put time and space into reverse.

In its theatricality, caricature-style book illustration approximates the tableau style popular in the nineteenth century. This chapter examines book illustrations by George Cruikshank, Phiz, Richard Doyle, John Leech, and Robert Cruikshank that, like tableaux, capture a dramatic moment in works by Dickens, Ainsworth, and Thackeray. With lighting, props, clever casting, and detail-laden backdrops, the caricaturists staged scenes ranging from the sensational to the sentimental, from the deeply psychological to the broadly comic. “Caricature: A Theatrical Development” adds two Victorian author-illustrators to this list of recognized caricaturists. Better known as an author than an illustrator, William Makepeace Thackeray designed theatrical pictorial capital letters, vignettes, tailpieces, and full-page engravings for his best-known Vanity Fair (1848) and cast his heroine Becky Sharp in various stage roles. To dramatize Alice’s transformations, Lewis Carroll recalled popular caricature techniques in his illustrations for the first version of Alice in Wonderland (1865) entitled Alice’s Adventures Underground(1864) at a time when realistic illustration held sway. This chapter also examines artistic limitations and scandals (e.g. Robert Seymour’s suicide, Cruikshank’s claim of authoring Dickens’s works) that led to a dismissal or devaluation of the caricaturists and a privileging of the Academy trained artists who entered the field of illustration in the 1850s.

This chapter investigates the relationships and tensions between Freud's, Foucault's and Deleuze's understandings of children's sexuality. There is some inconsistency, they argue, between how Deleuze writes about children and sexuality in The Logic of Sense and how he approaches the same topics with Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia texts. Looking particularly into how this ambiguous relation to psychoanalysis informs his writings about the characters of Freud's Little Hans and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the authors suggest that Deleuze's understanding of children and sexuality is marked by unsettled gender trouble as well as an unresolved involvement in Oedipal theories.

Philadelphia is celebrating 150 years of Alice in Wonderland with public programming and multiple exhibitions beginning in 2015 through 2016. There are lectures, tea parties, hands-on tours at the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia, talks of medical oddities of Alice, costume parties, and more. Carroll’s original manuscript is traveling around the East coast in pop-up displays in Philadelphia and New York. This focus on Lewis Carroll’s work provides an intriguing opportunity to examine Woolf’s review, which was written on the occasion of the Nonesuch Press issue of the complete works in 1939. Woolf ‘s response to Carroll’s legacy, in the midst of what she calls “non-war” and “written in barren horror,” hones in on the construction of childhood, the relationship of the child to the adult, and the illusory nature of the author. Woolf’s diary entries, documenting what she calls the many distractions surrounding her, point to the irony of composition and the world Carroll creates. In this paper I will approach these topics and consider the ways in which Woolf reflects on, engages with, and represents the connections and disconnections with the literary heritage of Alice and her enduring appeal.

In this tribute to Juliano Mer Khamis, who founded the Freedom Theatre at the heart of the Jenin refugee camp with Zakaria Zubeidi, the author comments on the theatrical performance of Alice in Wonderland, directed by Mer Khamis himself. He reflects on the role of art through theater in the struggle against the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian territories and cites Mer Khamis's other directorial work, Death and the Maiden. Finally, he recalls Mer Khamis's reply when asked what he had learned from the double experience inside the 1948 borders and as a director of Palestinian theater: “The Palestinian audience is prepared to see, experience, and hear texts that are much more audacious than those which Palestinian creators are willing—or dare!—to put before it. But a new generation of creators has arisen; they don't self-censor, they don't reign themselves in, not with regard to the Occupation and not with regard to the internal, repressive tradition.”

This chapter explores the relationship between two influential figures in British early cinema, Cecil Hepworth and Robert Paul. Hepworth literally forged his cinematic vision out of Pauls’ discarded frames. The first section traces the emergence of Hepworth’s language of cinema out of a bricolage of images, concepts and technologies – primarily the magic lantern, the cinematograph, the psychology of the persistence of vision, and popular storytelling devices. The second section focuses on Hepworth’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures (1903). This film reflects Hepworth’s interest in the visual effects of continuity, integrating image and text in a format that supplemented what he saw as the distracting flicker effects of the cinematograph with titles designed to trigger the audience’s memory of Carroll’s familiar tale. The final section of this chapter reveals the continuities between Hepworth’s screen practice and Hugo Munsterberg’s psychological approach to film. Resonating with Munsterberg’s stress on the analogy between film and mind, the memory of reading Alice’s Adventures that Hepworth’s channels through his film was intended to elide the space between the images projected on the screen and the nostalgic stream of images generated in the minds of the audience by Carroll’s words and Tenniel’s popular illustrations.

As the 2008 global recession irrevocably changed entertainment financing, films beyond blockbuster or microbudget production methods became anathema to studios. However, adaptations of Victorian literature did not die in this climate; they merely conformed to market demands whether in the form of Disney adaptations of Alice in Wonderland or a new iteration of BBC prestige drama. The last decade has seen a reduced, albeit largely well-received, series of 19^th century-set stories and literature adaptations in theatres and on television, largely bolstered by the rise of streaming. Within this context, interfidelity’s holistic approach and negotiation of specific relationships between texts as well as the production and industrial contexts in which films are produced is all the more vital. In bridging a contrapuntal reading of Victorian works with recent advances in adaptation studies, interfidelity fosters a space in which fidelity is a fundamental tool in tracing the development of Empire from colonial discourse to global capital’s post-recession evolution and its effect on Hollywood production. Though best illustrated by direct application to films that share the context of those discussed in this study, interfidelity is applicable to the host of current adaptation situations that result from Victorian texts’ continuing appeal and Hollywood’s increasingly transnational make-up.

This chapter investigates the particular kind of nostalgia at the heart of John Logan’s Peter and Alice, a play inspired by the brief real-life meeting in 1932 between Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies (the former muses of Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie, respectively). It argues that the same nostalgia permeates (and generated) Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—a proleptic nostalgia, fed by uniquely human intimations of adulthood. Logan’s eponymous characters seek to isolate that moment of dawning consciousness. In doing so they demonstrate that it is our capacity to anticipate, as much as our capacity to reflect, that makes the human condition inherently nostalgic. The chapter also shows how Barrie himself traced the genesis of his autarkic and amnesiac hero to an improvised version of that founding epic of nostalgia, Homer’s Odyssey.

Chapter 9 explores the Paramount publicity campaign that cast Cary Grant and Randolph Scott as Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, and it details Grant’s return visit to Bristol in 1933. While Grant appeared in weak films such as Alice in Wonderland (1933) and Born to Be Bad (1934), the studio attempted to build his name with publicity photographs that pictured him with Scott in the home that they shared. These photographs have been mistaken in recent times (and by previous biographers) as private snapshots revealing that the two men were lovers. In fact, the photographs were commissioned by Paramount, and they were carefully staged to appeal to the many women readers of film fan magazines, where they appeared many times in the mid-1930s. Grant’s return to Bristol, meanwhile, was one of the most tumultuous episodes in his life. The trip was meant to be a triumphant homecoming accompanied by his best friend (Scott) and his fiancé (Virginia Cherrill). However, his father took this opportunity to reveal that his mother was still alive, and that she had been in the asylum for nearly 19 years. Grant himself was hospitalized for several weeks after this revelation, although the nature of his illness remains a mystery. On release, he married Cherrill in a hasty ceremony in London, and returned to Hollywood to resume his career.