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A Study of the Literary Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
- 1 School of English Studies, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, Dalian,116041, China
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Abstract
Nonsense Literature has always been an obscure viewpoint of literature studies. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (referred to as Through the Looking-Glass hence) witnessed Lewis Carroll bring this peculiar genre into the spotlight. He designed a series of fictional characters and devised several poems on which he endowed the united characteristic of “talking nonsense”. This essay aims at analyzing the nonsensical discourse in Through the Looking-Glass, which includes nonsensical utterances, nonsensical poems, and illogical narrations. Starting with skepticisms from the proposals on implicature, the essay proceeds onto the Language Game theory of Wittgenstein, followed by the life story of Carroll himself and the analysis of a typical nonsensical poem. As the existing studies of Nonsensical Literature fails to merge the work with the man, this essay intends to establish a new method of cross referencing in order to achieve a more profound understanding of said literature as well as Lewis Carroll.
Keywords
Literary Nonsense, Lewis Carroll, Language Game theory
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Cite this article
Tian,P. (2023). A Study of the Literary Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Communications in Humanities Research,2,404-409.
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Volume title: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries (ICEIPI 2022), Part III
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