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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781535312455 |
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Publisher: | CreateSpace Publishing |
Publication date: | 07/17/2016 |
Pages: | 48 |
Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.10(d) |
About the Author
Date of Birth:
January 27, 1832Date of Death:
January 14, 1898Place of Birth:
Daresbury, Cheshire, EnglandPlace of Death:
Guildford, Surrey, EnglandEducation:
Richmond School, Christ Church College, Oxford University, B.A., 1854; M.A., 1857Read an Excerpt
From the Foreword
There exists a certain kind of mind that is uncomfortable with ambiguity, nonsense, and the creative imagination. Such persons attempt to reduce the abstruse to some prosaic explication, which they then often insist is the only way to look at it, and surely was the original intent of the author, whose mind they know better than he or she did. This has frequently been the fate of the Snark and, for that matter, Carroll's two masterful Alice books, for those of limited intelligence (intellect, which such persons might possess in abundance, is another matter entirely) who 'read' the poem in their own idiosyncratic way. (Analogously, we in the States elected a man as our leader who sees things exactly as he wishes to see them and allows no such things as facts or truth to stand in his way.)
Contrariwise, as Tweedledee would say, more enlightened minds can rejoice in profound and perplexing-another term might be 'poetic'-works of art. Hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) can better be used to demonstrate how a text could be construed a certain way, thereby proving, with great humor and wisdom, just how infinite is its depth. Fortunately, we are in such hands with this present edition, which does not dictate but rather wittily utilizes illustrations to the poem to memorialize a moment in political time, the bewildering administration of Donald J. Trump and his cronies, by assigning caricatures of his staff to the expedition's crew.
As Ben Hecht put it in A Guide for the Bedevilled (1945), 'Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.' Already at this writing some of the persons caricatured in this edition have left the administration-Anthony Scaramucci, Reince Priebus, and Stephen K. Bannon-but that does not affect George Walker's superb caricatures, nor this edition serving as an aide-mémoire of a baffling yet historic time.
-Mark Burstein, President Emeritus of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America
Table of Contents
A Cabinet of Curiosities Mark Burstein 7
Preface Andy Malcolm 13
List of Characters 15
Inscribed to a Dear Child 17
Fit the First: The Landing 23
Fit the Second: The Bellman's Speech 31
Fit the Third: The Baker's Tale 39
Fit the Fourth: The Hunting 43
Fit the Fifth: The Beaver's Lesson 53
Fit the Sixth: The Barrister's Dream 67
Fit the Seventh: The Banker's Fate 75
Fit the Eighth: The Vanishing 77
A Snarky End George A. Walker 81