Know Your English Literature Part. XIII

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Children’s book by Lewis Carroll published in 1865 and written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of a friend. Alice enters Wonderland by following the white Rabbit down his hole, and has many strange adventures there. She meets the Mad Hatter and the march Hare, the grinning Cheshire Cat and the Queen of hearts, who shouts, ‘Off with her head!’ when Alice makes a mistake at croquet. The book was highly successful and was followed in 1872 by through the Looking Glass.

The book has been interpreted in many different ways, from being a satire on the court of Queen Victoria or academic pedantry at oxford, to mocking the legal system or exploring the unconscious mind.

William Wordsworth: English poet whose work played a major role in the development of Romanticism in English literature. His writing expresses a mystical view of life in which nature and the unman spirit are closely connected. Wordsworth grew up in Cumbria, and the Lake District country side inspired many of his poems, such as ‘The prelude,’ ‘Intimations of Immortality’ and ‘Resolution and Independence’. He was a close friend of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in 1798 they published a joint volume, Lyrical Ballads, which included such poems as The Rime of the ancient mariner and Tintern Abbey. He was mad poet laureate in 1843.

Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy and wife, Mary, at Dove Cottage, now a museum, in Grasmere.

Brer Rabbit: Wily animal character from black American folklore used by the 19^th century American author Joel Chandler Harris in his ‘Uncle Remus’ tales.

Brer is a dialect version of brother