With its matter-of-fact weirdness, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has captivated the imagination of children, stage and screen directors, and literary scholars alike since its publication in 1865. A small library could be built to house the many editions and voluminous commentaries inspired by Lewis Carroll’s fantasy. However, if you’d like to choose a single book, you could do no better than Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice, out now in a beautiful 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (W.W. Norton).
The new edition includes the full text of Alice accompanied by Gardner’s Talmudic array of footnotes and exegesis. As one of the 20th century’s most learned Carroll scholars, Gardner illuminates the Shakespearean allusions, the references to Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, compares remarks by the Cheshire Cat to Carroll’s diary entries and cites Socrates’ question: Can we ever know for sure if we are dreaming or awake? The illustrations, culled from 150 years of Alice editions, are a delight.
* The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Philip and Carol Zaleski
J.R.R. Tolkien was more influential in popular culture than any 20th-century novelist. He’s reason enough for the massive size of this erudite study of the Inklings, the drinking club where Tolkien read The Hobbit in progress to C.S. Lewis and other academics with a distaste for the contemporary world. Tolkien and Lewis occupy most of this witty account, but the lesser-knowns show the Inklings to be more diverse than usually thought. The authors successfully argue that the circle influenced philosophy, comparative mythology, medieval studies and theology as well as literature.
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* Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word (W.W. Norton), by Matthew Battles
Writing isn’t simply a way of documenting speech, but can transcend speech by opening new doors to expression and communication. That’s one theme in Palimpsest, which is less a linear history of alphabets and writing systems than a series of essays that illuminate the development and meaning of the written word and coaxes new awareness of things taken for granted.
* Protest on the Page: Essays in Print and the Culture of Dissent (University of Wisconsin Press), edited by James L. Baughman, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen and James P. Danky
Many will automatically connect “protest writing” and “dissent” with the left, but as shown in some of the essays collected here, such writing can flourish at any point along the political spectrum. For example, Southern newspapers maintained defiant resistance during Reconstruction, often with blatantly racist arguments; and after World War II Protestant fundamentalists, dissenting against the culture of modernism, circulated their ideas through a network of publications and publishing houses.
* Quixote: The Novel and the World (W.W. Norton), by Ilan Stavans
Literary criticism is seldom this good. In Quixote, Amherst Latin-American studies professor Ilan Stavans examines Cervantes’ epochal novel from many angles, finding a multitude of meanings. Was the knight errant a madman? A fighter against injustice? An anachronism or a harbinger of modernity? And, with affable sidekick, Sancho Panza, was Don Quixote the template for every odd couple Holmes-and-Watson story told since? Stavans’ work is almost more enjoyable to read than the novel on which it comments.
* Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays (Alfred A. Knopf), by Tina Packer
As founding director of Shakespeare & Company, Tina Packer devoted her professional life to the Bard’s plays. She observes that his texts can only be understood in performance, as “embodied words” rather than words on paper. However, her main point concerns Shakespeare’s evolving attitude toward women, a journey from Taming of the Shrew to The Winter’s Tale. Packer convincingly traces the routes by which his female characters ceased being “projections of a man’s imagination” but “full human beings.”
* Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Robert Crawford
The angst-ridden poet who expressed his many frustrations in “The Waste Land” had a happy childhood and a naughty sense of humor as an adult. Such are the revelations in Robert Crawford’s comprehensive biography, which begins in St. Louis and carries through the early years of T.S. Eliot’s European self-exile and the publication of “The Waste Land,” a milestone of modernism. Eliot emerges as likable if troubled, a genius who (like most of us) was unable to entirely escape the prejudices of his time.
