"What is the use of a book without pictures?" : Reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Abstract

Summary

Lewis Carroll s Alice s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865, with illustrations by the Punch cartoonist John Tenniel. Since then, the book has been published in numerous editions featuring the work of hundreds of artists who offer their visual interpretations of the story. This thesis explores a few selected representatives from amongst these hundreds, attempting to define the ways in which they render the words of the story to mean different things from one version to the next. The illustrators presently examined are Lewis Carroll himself, John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham, S. Michelle Wiggins, Abelardo Morell, Helen Oxenbury, Lisbeth Zwerger and Iassen Ghiuselev. Additionally, the Walt Disney cartoon adaptation of the book is examined as a possible source of influence on the story s reception by modern day readers. As tools for this exploration, Gerard Genette s terms paratext and metatext are used, as well as some of Roland Barthes terms originally applied to photography, but in this context rendered to comprise other visual works as well. The above mentioned terms are discussed, along with a few other theories of literary reception, and combined to serve as an apparatus for explicating the relationship between text and image.