Retracing the steps of a surprising array of twentieth-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll’s fictions and discovered there the quintessence of their own modernity, this book demonstrates that Carroll’s influence extended far beyond literary style. Chapters show how Carroll’s writings had a far reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics, from philosophy to the new physics. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental.

This book shows us the Alice we recognize from Carroll’s novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.