Carroll, Lewis - Gabriele Schwab (essay date 1994)
Gabriele Schwab (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: Schwab, Gabriele. “Nonsense and Metacommunication: Reflections on Lewis Carroll.” In The Play of the Self, edited by Ronald Bogue and Mihai I. Spariosu, pp. 157-79. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
[In the following essay, Schwab considers Carroll's experimental treatment of language, maintaining that his work anticipates the twentieth-century movements of surrealism, modernism, and postmodernism.]
The history of nonsense literature is intrinsically linked to the history of literary realism. With the latter's insistence on the validity of the quotidian as an aesthetic object, nineteenth-century realism led to a radical redefinition of the traditional notion of mimesis. The novel is supposed to portray the life of its hero within a realistic fiction of the social world. Even the so-called psychological novel, with its attempt to evoke the “inner lives” of its characters, is...
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