Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular.

Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of consciousness, the transformative power of language and the arbitrariness of authority.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

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Further reading in the LRB:

Marina Warner: You Must Not Ask

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n01/marina-warner/you-must-not-ask

Dinah Birch: Never Seen A Violet

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/dinah-birch/never-seen-a-violet

Marina Warner: Doubly Damned

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned

Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist

Next episode: The stories of Franz Kafka, with Adam Thirlwell.

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

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