The double life od Alice, or the Wonderland in literary and scientific culture

Lewis Carroll’s sophisticated and intellectually appealing Victorian children’s stories Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) have more recently become some of the most frequently cited literary works. Interestingly, the Alice books have turned out to be attractive to writers and academics who adapt the Carrollian nonsense world both to new generic forms of adult literature and also to philosophical and scientific works. An analysis of some representative examples of these literary and philosophical texts reveals a curious paradox: whereas in the latter case the nonsensical character of the Alice stories is preserved with nonsense fulfilling an important meta-sense function, in the literary variant the logic of nonsense is replaced by the trivial rules of fantasy found in the literary genre and in computer games, a poetics of postmodern pastiche and parody, or a convention of subjective narrative starkly contrasting with the non- emotional style of the source texts.