Beware the White Rabbit: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and A. G. Howard’s Splintered as Gothic Cautionary Tales for Young Girls
Abstract
The aim of this article is to speculate on the meaning that Lewis Carroll’s (1865, 1871) Alice’s journey through dark Wonderland has acquired in two examples of contemporary YA fiction, Tim Burton’s 2010 film adaptation and A. G. Howard’s 2013 Splintered novel, both depicting Wonderlands that are more dangerous and threatening than what Carroll himself envisioned in his novels. The study shows how Alice’s gender and the fact that she is now portrayed as an adolescent affect her narrative. Among other reasons, the author of the paper argues that the fact that Carroll’s books feature a girl protagonist who wanders alone in a strange land, together with a long-standing tradition of warning girls against doing precisely this, has resulted in the proliferation of YA narratives that turn Carroll’s ‘golden afternoon’ into a Gothic nightmare.
Keywords
adaptation; A. G. Howard; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Alice in Wonderland; children’s and young adult literature; fantasy; Gothic; Lewis Carroll; rewriting; sequel; Splintered; Tim Burton; Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
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University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia Spain
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9832-3988
Auba Llompart Pons – PhD, works at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Applied Languages of the Faculty of Education, Translation and Humanities at the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia (Spain). Her research interests include children’s and young adult literature, fairy tales, Gothic studies, and gender studies. Contact: auba.llompart@uvic.cat.
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