This Norton Critical Edition reprints the 1897 editions of Alice''s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and the 1876 edition of The Hunting of the Snark. New to the Second Edition is "The Wasp in a Wig," a recently discovered episode Carroll deleted from Through the Looking-Glass, but which fits into the story in interesting ways. Each text is accompanied by ample explanatory notes. "Backgrounds" reprints new selections from recent biographies of Carroll and from recent editions of his diaries and letters. Our understanding of and appreciation for Carroll''s life and literature are deepened by new contributions from Anne Clark, Tony Beale, E. M. Rowell, and, most revealingly, Carroll himself. "Criticism" retains seven seminal critiques from the First Edition while adding four important recent essays by Nina Auerbach, Roger Henkle, Robert Polhemus, and Donald Rackin. A revised and updated Selected Bibliography is also included.
 
Annotation:
As he escorted the three young daughters of a colleague on a trip up the river Isis, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson invented ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, the story of a little girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole. Written down expressly for Alice Liddell, the story was originally entitled ALICE'S ADVENTURES UNDERGROUND, but it is also known as ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and it was published under the name of Lewis Carroll. The book is full of such wonderfully eccentric characters as the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, and the Mad Hatter. The book is simultaneously a political allegory, a parody of Victorian children's literature, a fairy tale, a dream, and a child's chronicle of growing up. Carroll also wrote a sequel entitled THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE.