English: Supp'y texts: Alice

Title and Details:
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
Type of text:
Childrens’ novel
Context and Purpose of text:
Written by Carroll as a fantastic escape, not only for children, but for all who had once been children to remember the simple dreams of that time.





What ideas of the imaginative journey are conveyed to the responder?
Journeys do not have to be “real” to teach a lesson, to feel pain or to enjoy. Journeys of the mind do not often make sense as it would in the real world. Journeys can be circular.








How are these ideas conveyed to the responder?
Many of the incidents and the characters in the novel are ridiculous and impossible, eg. talking rabbits, the mad tea party and shrinking and enlarging. But they all have metaphorical meaning and Alice leans many lessons during her journey. At the end, she returns to the “real world” and is told it was all a dream.









Links to poetry of Coleridge and Stimulus Booklet text:
Link to This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison in that Alice is bored and sick of sitting on the bank, so she journeys into her own imagination, a world much richer than that which surrounds her. Although at first she is bewildered and scared of this new world, by the end, she is comfortable and can appreciate every nuance of the world in her mind. She awakes and is no longer bored, but enriched by her imagined experiences. Link to The Ivory Trail because of the fantastic journey to another place, or Journey to the Interior because it too is a journey to the world inside the author’s mind and the strange things to be found there.