Making Wonderland. Worldbuilding Process in Lewis Carroll's Texts

Abstract

The Wonderland that is presented for the first time in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is, nowadays, easily recognizable in any adaptation or through all kinds of references, from songs such as I am the Walrus (John Lennon for The Beatles, 1967) to expressions such as “follow the White Rabbit”. This happens because the writer managed to create a world that differentiates from any other fantastic universe, and he did it through a girl’s dream; therefore, Alice is the one who conceives that world, being the result of her imagination. This means that Wonderland is the narrative scenario that a Victorian Oxford girl would come up with. The protagonist’s reality is the basis for a whole realm of nonsense coming alive. This work goes through these roots, in order to understand how Alice, in Carroll’s mind, created the fantastic world that she goes deep into in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.