SOURCE: Schwab, Gabriele. “Nonsense and Metacommunication: Reflections on Lewis Carroll.” In The Play of the Self, edited by Ronald Bogue and Mihai I. Spariosu, pp. 157-79. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Schwab considers Carroll's experimental treatment of language, maintaining that his work anticipates the twentieth-century movements of surrealism, modernism, and postmodernism.

The history of nonsense literature is intrinsically linked to the history of literary realism. With the latter's insistence on the validity of the quotidian as an aesthetic object, nineteenth-century realism led to a radical redefinition of the traditional notion of mimesis. The novel is supposed to portray the life of its hero within a realistic fiction of the social world. Even the so-called psychological novel, with its attempt to evoke the “inner lives” of its characters, is still concerned with realism and mimesis.

The new Victorian genre of nonsense literature, by...