SOURCE: Sigler, Carolyn. Introduction to Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books: An Anthology, pp. xi-xxiii. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

In the following essay, Sigler provides an overview of the critical reception of the Alice stories over the last century and discusses Carroll's contributions to literary modernism.

It may be thought that in introducing a certain little lady ALICEnce has been taken. But royal personages are public property.

—Jean Jambon, Our Trip to Blundertown (1876)

Alternative Alices brings together some of the most lively and original of the almost two hundred literary imitations, revisions, and parodies of Lewis Carroll's enduringly influential Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Produced between 1869 and 1930, the works represented here do not passively imitate Carroll, but trace the extraordinarily coherent, creative, and often critical responses to the Alice novels.

The Alice imitations of this period embody the golden age...