Laura White – författare

Though popular opinion would have us see Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There as whimsical, nonsensical, and thoroughly enjoyable stories told mostly for children; contemporary research has shown us there is a vastly greater depth to the stories than would been seen at first glance. Building on the now popular idea amongst Alice enthusiasts, that the Alice books - at heart - were intended for adults as well as children, Laura White takes current research in a new, fascinating direction. During the Victorian era of the book’s original publication, ideas about nature and our relation to nature were changing drastically. The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World argues that Lewis Carroll used the book’s charm, wit, and often puzzling conclusions to counter the emerging tendencies of the time which favored Darwinism and theories of evolution and challenged the then-conventional thinking of the relationship between mankind and nature. Though a scientist and ardent student of nature himself, Carroll used his famously playful language, fantastic worlds and brilliant, often impossible characters to support more the traditional, Christian ideology of the time in which mankind holds absolute sovereignty over animals and nature.

The Play of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tales and Fairy Narratives examines the range of playful negotiations with truth claims in British and American fantasies for children of the nineteenth century within the context of the era’s ebbing Christian commitments and competing forces for belief and disenchantment.While Victorian culture was broadly Christian, its fantasy literature for children shed the explicit piety of writers of earlier generations to embrace magical tales of many stripes. In many ways the story of children’s literature in the nineteenth century is one of a Christian culture disinheriting itself, turning its angels into fairies, its faith into a range of doubts, and blending its Christian ethics with progressive evolutionary ideals. The study shows how authors embraced a wide variety of rhetorical and narrative strategies by which play, ambiguity, and hesitation could suggest what is or is not “real.” Inevitably, such strategies brought disenchantment in their wake, for the more Victorian authors foregrounded the problem of belief, the more they betrayed the nervousness of their own affirmations, especially in the glut of sentiment and frenzied fantasy which typifies fin de siècle fairy tales.This essential study illuminates the historical nature of children’s literature, making it indispensable reading for scholars of Victorian culture, children's fantasy, and anyone fascinated by the enduring power of fairy tales.

Though popular opinion would have us see Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There as whimsical, nonsensical, and thoroughly enjoyable stories told mostly for children; contemporary research has shown us there is a vastly greater depth to the stories than would been seen at first glance. Building on the now popular idea amongst Alice enthusiasts, that the Alice books - at heart - were intended for adults as well as children, Laura White takes current research in a new, fascinating direction. During the Victorian era of the book’s original publication, ideas about nature and our relation to nature were changing drastically. The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World argues that Lewis Carroll used the book’s charm, wit, and often puzzling conclusions to counter the emerging tendencies of the time which favored Darwinism and theories of evolution and challenged the then-conventional thinking of the relationship between mankind and nature. Though a scientist and ardent student of nature himself, Carroll used his famously playful language, fantastic worlds and brilliant, often impossible characters to support more the traditional, Christian ideology of the time in which mankind holds absolute sovereignty over animals and nature.