Publisher's Synopsis
Children's literature: what are the greatest, most widely read, most influential, most translated and most adapted classics? Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and Carlo Collodi's Le Avventure di Pinocchio (1883) must be prime candidates, and through them this book explores what it means to be transnational fantasy icons - while at the same time being deeply rooted in national cultures. How are these books connected to the world's psyche through folktales and fairy tales, while being quintessentially British and Italian, and how have Alice and Pinocchio become staples of postmodernism? There is an abundance of critical works on the Alice books and Pinocchio as separate entities but there have been, until today, no scholarly books that consider both together: broadly contemporaneous with each other, and although they were published with radically different political, social and cultural backgrounds, there are surprising similarities between the Alice books and Pinocchio, and between their authors' perspectives. This timely book fills this gap: The Parallel Worlds of Alice and Pinocchio] is a parallel reading of texts that are one-offs in their own countries, texts that are very far from - and in many ways in direct opposition to - the didactic turn in children's books. It ranges across the whole spectrum of comparative literary studies, exploring such diverse areas as imagology, cultural history, literary criticism and biography, and extends the discussion into British and Italian school and adventure stories.
