A-level Drama - Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: Books

This page includes information on a number of books which are based on the story of Alice in Wonderland.  I have also included a book, The Phantom Tollbooth, which is written on a similar theme to Alice in Wonderland and a list of authors who have written on similar themes or in a similar context.

Books by many of the following authors are available from the Senior Library.

SURREALIST AUTHORS

Nabokov (he translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian)

Kafka

Joyce

Beckett 

Ionesco

Pinter

Borges

Pynchon

Zamyatin

Mervyn Peake

James Stephens     

VICTORIAN FANTASY AUTHORS

Edward Lear

J.M.Barrie

Kenneth Graham    

A.A.Milne         

Charles Dickens

MORE AUTHORS 

Emily Bronte

George Eliot

Elizabeth Gaskell

Thomas Hardy

Rudyard Kipling

Robert Louis Stephenson

Arthur Conan Doyle

Anna Sewell

W.H. Hudson

Tolkien

This Libguide was originally conceptualized and created by Suzanne Parfitt, Astt. Librarian at Tanglin Trust School from 2009-2015. 

It is maintained and updated by Senior Library Staff.

The Phantom Tollbooth is written on a similar theme to Alice in Wonderland.

Summary: In the last years of his life, the fantasist , Lewis Carroll, wrote a third Alice book.  This mysterious work has never been published or even shown to anybody.  It has only recently been discovered.  Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future.  That's not quite true.  Automated Alice was in reality written by Zenith O'Clock, the writer of wrongs.  In the book, he sends Alice through a clock's workings.  She travels through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in 1998, in Manchester, a small town in the North of England.  Oh dear, tha't not at all right.  This trequel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was actually written by Jeff Noon.  Zenith O'Clock is only a character invented by Jeff Noon and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely accidental.  What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too...a series of misadventures, even weirder than your dreams. (Summary from Wheelers Books)

Source of picture: Amazon.com, 2011. Automated Alice: paperback. [Online] Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Automated-Alice-Jeff-Noon/dp/0552144789 [Accessed 28 January 2011].

Summary: Wolf Alice is based on an obscure variant of Little Red Riding Hood and with reference to Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, this tale explores the journey towards subjectivity and self-awareness from the perspective of a feral child.  A feral child, whom some nuns have attempted to civilize, is left in the house of a monstrous, vampiric Duke where she does not develop the appropriate social graces.  She gradually comes to realise her own identity as a young woman and even displays compassion for the Duke.  (Summary from Wikipedia)

Summary: The Westminster Alice

is the name of a collection of vignettes written by Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) in 1902 and published by the Westminster Gazette of London. It is a political parody of Lewis Carroll's two books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.  The book features 48 drawings after the originals by John Tenniel which were drawn by Francis Carruthers Gould. It is critical of the politics of the day, of which Alice tries to make sense. A number of notable British politicians are identified in the book. Joseph Chamberlain is the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen, and the Mad Hatter; Arthur Balfour is the White Queen, and the March Hare, Robert Cecil is the King of Hearts and the Dormouse; Archbishop of Canterbury Frederick Temple is the Duchess; and Redvers Henry Buller is Humpty Dumpty. (Summary from Wikipedia)

We also have the audio book version of the above book which is available for loan from the Senior Library.

This is the second book in Frank Beddor's 'The Looking Glass Wars' trilogy.  It is available for loan from the Senior Library.

Summary: Few works of literature are as universally beloved as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole- and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling.  But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland.  Does it sound ungrateful?  Alice Liddell Hargreaves's life has been a richly woven tapestry:  As a young woman, wife, mother and widow, she's experienced intense passion, great privilege, and great tragedy.  But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and always will be only "Alice".  Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year - the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.  That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over,  Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice - he changes her life forever.  But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to.  And as Alices' childhood slips away, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all.  Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.  A love story and a literary mystery, Alice I Have Been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire.  (Summary from Google Books)