Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Anne K. Mellor

Critical Essay by Anne K. Mellor

SOURCE: "Fear and Trembling: From Lewis Carroll to Existentialism," in English Romantic Irony, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 165-84.

In the following excerpt, Mellor addresses the philosophical implications of Alice's world, and compares and contrasts Carroll's "romantic irony" with Seren Kierkegaard's Existentialism.

[Like other romantic ironists] . . . , Lewis Carroll conceived the ontological universe as uncontrolled flux. But unlike the others, this Victorian don was frightened by this vision. Lewis Carroll shared his upper-class contemporaries' anxiety that change was change for the worse, not the better. The Reform Bill of 1832 had initiated a political leveling of English society; the Industrial Revolution had created a society whose highest priority was materialistic prosperity rather than spiritual growth and freedom; the new Higher Criticism of the Bible propounded by David Friedrich Strauss and Joseph Ernst Renan had undermined the fundamentalist Christian belief in the divinity of Christ;...
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