UNV-102-13 & 14: Transformation (Irving): Books and eBooks

One golden summer afternoon, on the banks of the River Thames, the young Oxford professor Charles Dodgson shared a picnic with three little girls, who asked for a story. One of them was Alice, and the adventure he created for her under the pen name Lewis Carroll has captured the hearts of readers throughout the world. Who was this mathematician-turned-writer, and why has his tale enchanted us for generations? Enter the mind of Lewis Carroll, whose command of logic and whimsy gave us the timeless magic of Alice in Wonderland.

Following his acclaimed life of Dickens, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst illuminates the tangled history of two lives and two books. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, he examines in detail the peculiar friendship between the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories, and analyzes how this relationship stirred Carroll's imagination and influenced the creation of Wonderland. It also explains why Alice in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871), took on an unstoppable cultural momentum in the Victorian era and why, a century and a half later, they continue to enthrall and delight readers of all ages. The Story of Alice reveals Carroll as both an innovator and a stodgy traditionalist, entrenched in habits and routines. He had a keen double interest in keeping things moving and keeping them just as they are. (In Looking-Glass Land, Alice must run faster and faster just to stay in one place.) Tracing the development of the Alice books from their inception in 1862 to Liddell's death in 1934, Douglas-Fairhurst also provides a keyhole through which to observe a larger, shifting cultural landscape: the birth of photography, changing definitions of childhood, murky questions about sex and sexuality, and the relationship between Carroll's books and other works of Victorian literature. In the stormy transition from the Victorian to the modern era, Douglas-Fairhurst shows, Wonderland became a sheltered world apart, where the line between the actual and the possible was continually blurred.

This volume offers a selection of critical essays on texts that can be broadly categorized as popular literature. The essays are inclined to question the idea of the Canon and re-consider the divide between the canonical and the popular. As such, besides engaging in a serious critical reading of typical popular literary texts like "The Jungle Book" and "The Hound of the Baskervilles", the book also considers populist tendencies in literary classics like "Jane Eyre" and "Frankenstein". It will be of interest to young scholars and readers of popular literature, science fiction, detective fiction, genre studies, and culture studies. The volumes contributors are: Anisha Ghosh, Arnab Dasgupta, Goutam Karmakar, Jaya Sarkar, Jaydip Sarkar, Madhuparna Mitra Guha, Mandika Sinha, Mitarik Barma, Pinaki Roy, Puja Chakraborty, Rajadipta Roy, Rupayan Mukherjee, Shirsendu Mandal, Shubham Dey.

The astonishing life of Octavian nothing / by M.T. Anderson) -- Beasts of no nation / by Uzodinma Iweala -- The book thief / by Markus Zusak -- Brother, I'm dying / by Edwidge Danticat -- Chew on this / by Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson -- The coast of utopia / by Tom Stoppard -- Eragon / by Christopher Paolini -- Flush / by Carl Hiaasen -- The gathering / by Anne Enright -- Harry Potter and the deathly hallows / by J.K. Rowling -- The memory keeper's daughter / by Kim Edwards -- No country for old men / by Cormac McCarthy -- Runaway / by Alice Munro -- Sold / by Patricia McCormick -- A thousand splendid suns / by Khaled Hosseini -- Water for elephants / by Sara Gruen -- World without end / by Ken Follett -- A wreath for Emmett Till / by Marilyn Nelson.