Alice in Wonderland (actually titled Alice: Through the Looking-glass) by Lewis Carroll is very commonly parodied. It would seem that almost everyone has come across a pun or bastardization of this title, which is so easily co-opted for other means. The Alice story is fanciful and full of surrealism to start with, which makes it easy to twist around in other ways—making it darker, sexual, or political depending on what the author of the parody is wanting.

A lesser known fact (unless you are a literature fanatic) about Alice in Wonderland is that it was a parody itself (Parodies of Lewis Carroll and their Originals—can be found in RBSC UBC). Lewis Carroll took many short songs and rhymes which would have been commonly memorized by children of his time and altered them, creating the silly songs found in the original book. Perhaps the one example which is still known in its original un-parodied form today is “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, which Carroll of course altered into “Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat”. This one example is an immediately obvious one to modern readers, but what might not be as well understood by others is that all sixteen of the songs or poems in Alice would have actually been parodies to the original audience to the same magnitude as “Twinkle Twinkle” is to modern readers. This makes a large portion of the Alice book a parody of children’s literature itself—making the fact that it is commonly parodied now even more interesting. The main difference here is that Carroll took children’s literature and parodied it for children themselves, whereas the parodies of Alice itself are mainly geared towards an adult audience.

I am interested in determining what it is that makes Alice so susceptible to parody for an adult audience, and exactly how this is done within the parodies I have found. I will examine four examples of Alice parodies held in the UBC Rare Books and Special Collections which seem to exemplify the ways in which the children’s story is parodied for an adult audience. Within these three books I will examine three elements of each parody to find commonalities: formal aspects, what about the book makes it a parody, and what about the book makes it unsuitable for kids. By answering these questions I hope that a common thread amongst the books will be found. This approach also lets me look at each book as a separate entity—giving a bit more room for exploration on the particular areas of interest with each book.

So go ahead and click through the four different books listed here to learn more about each one, and then explore the Conclusions page for an account of the combined findings.