Next to the Alice books, Carroll's
The Hunting of the Snark (1876) attracts the most attention and admiration as a nonsense epic in verse, an absurdist quest poem, a
Moby- Dick of the nursery. Carroll wrote humorous works for children and some for his Oxford colleagues, as well as publishing many puzzles and games. Among these, the letters written over the years to his child-friends strike the classic nonsense note. The long, late novels
Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) have risen in critical regard to the status of interesting failures for their mixture of fantasy and societynovel realism. Their high seriousness contrasts strikingly with the nondidacticism that makes the Alice books and
The Hunting of the Snark seem light, dry, problematical, and "modern," even "postmodern." Interesting as period pieces, the
Sylvie and Bruno novels also prefigure twentiethcentury experimentations in form.
Quite different from these literary works are mathematics and logic studies by Carroll. These products of his career as a professor at Christ Church, Oxford, run the gamut from the purely academic— An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867)—to the wittily serious— Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), The Game of Logic (1886), and Symbolic Logic, Parts I and II (1896, 1977).
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