Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded by David Day

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded by David Day

This gorgeous 150th anniversary edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is also a revelatory work of scholarship.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland--published 150 years ago in 1865--is a book many of us love and feel we know well. But it turns out we have only scratched the surface. Scholar David Day has spent many years down the rabbit hole of this children's classic and has emerged with a revelatory new view of its contents. What we have here, he brilliantly and persuasively argues, is a complete classical education in coded form--Carroll's gift to his wonder child Alice Liddell.
In two continuous commentaries, woven around the complete text of the novel for ease of cross-reference on every page, David Day reveals the many layers of teaching, concealed by manipulation of language, that are carried so lightly in the beguiling form of a fairy tale. These layers relate directly to Carroll's interest in philosophy, history, mathematics, classics, poetry, spiritualism and even to his love of music--both sacred and profane. His novel is a memory palace, given to Alice as the great gift of an education. It was delivered in coded form because in that age, it was a gift no girl would be permitted to receive in any other way.
Day also shows how a large number of the characters in the book are based on real Victorians. Wonderland, he shows, is a veritable Who's Who of Oxford at the height of its power and influence in the Victorian Age.
There is so much to be found behind the imaginary characters and creatures that inhabit the pages of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. David Day's warm, witty and brilliantly insightful guide--beautifully designed and stunningly illustrated throughout in full colour--will make you marvel at the book as never before.

David Day has been a research fellow at Clare College in Cambridge, a visiting professor at University College Dublin, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Tokyo, and an ARC senior research fellow at La Trobe University. He is currently an honorary associate at La Trobe University in Melbourne and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. His many books include best-selling histories of the Second World War, biographies of Australian prime ministers, and a study of Winston Churchill and Robert Menzies that has been made into a television documentary.His books have won or been short-listed for several literary prizes, with Claiming a Continent winning the non-fiction prize at the Adelaide Festival. Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others has appeared to acclaim in Australia, Britain, and the United States, and has been translated into several languages. His most recent book is the widely acclaimed Antarctica: A Biography (OUP, 2013).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385682268
ISBN 10	0385682263
Title	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded
Author	David Day
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House Canada
Year published	2015-09-29
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.