The Snark Matrix

Lewis Carroll Review; The Reviewing Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society, 2019

INTERSTUDIA, 2017

The main objective of Ezequiel Ferriol’s article is to answer a question posed by the editor and commentator Martin Gardner: “Why in the world were they sharpening a spade?” (Gardner 2006: 44), in relation to what the crew of Lewis Carroll’s «The Hunting of the Snark» was doing for seeking that impossible creature: “the Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade”. By performing a philological analysis of any possible locus similis throughout Carroll’s works, the author studies all matches found in the light of semantics, semiotics, and transtextuality.

The Lewis Carroll Review: The Reviewing Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society , 2021

Recto Verso Revue De Jeunes Chercheurs En Critique Genetique, 2008

Bruno's Revenge", the little tale which constitutes the nucleus of Lewis Carroll's novel Sylvie and Bruno, was written and published in June 1867. As early as 1874, Carroll had formed the project of expanding the story into a child's book, and asked Henry Holiday if he would illustrate it 1. Yet the two volumes of the novel, Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, would only be published in 1889 and 1893. For more than ten years, the writing up of the novel was at a standstill while Carroll kept looking for a suitable illustrator 2 , merely accumulating material for the story until Harry Furniss finally agreed to take up the task at the beginning of March 1885 3. The work Furniss was undertaking to illustrate was not at all a finished novel, as is the usual custom, but a text in progress, hardly written up yet. A few days after Furniss had agreed, Carroll wrote to him: "I have a considerable mass of chaotic materials for a story, but have never had the heart to go and construct the story as a whole, owing to its seeming so hopeless that I should ever find a suitable artist. Now that you are found…" 4. It would be more than two years before Carroll could tell him: "I have the backbone of the book complete, and all the incidents and scenes arranged" 5 , by which time Furniss had already completed eleven pictures 6 and was working on at least five more 7 , while most of the text was still scattered notes. The nine-year collaboration between Carroll and Furniss was thus intended as a true partnership, with text and illustrations being written and drawn simultaneously. The only surviving materials documenting this genesis are Carroll's private diaries, now published in their entirety by Edward Wakeling, the correspondence between Carroll and his illustrators (Tenniel, Holiday, Frost, Furniss and Gertrude Thomson), including numerous sketches, published in 2003 by Morton Cohen and Edward Wakeling, and the correspondence between Carroll and the house of Macmillan. They nonetheless allow a reconstitution of the genesis of the novel which throws a light on this collaboration and on Carroll's mode of creation 8 .

Dickens Studies Annual, 2018

Recorded in this essay is the sweep of Lewis Carroll scholarship covering 2004–2017. New Primary Works; Critical, Annotated or Notable Editions; Reference Works; Biographies; Journals and Websites; Book-length Studies; Collections of Essays; and Selected Journal Essays and Book Chapters are covered. During the period discussed, diverse interest in Lewis Carroll and his works increased steadily and was extensive, more in evidence than for many if not most Victorian writers. The topics of interest related to this multitalented man—literature, photography, biography, mathematics and logic, Victorian cultural studies and more, and seen from many critical and thematic perspectives—have become increasingly broad and accepted as worthy of study of a major figure, and his Alice books established as major texts of world literature.

Book History, 2019

Early Popular Visual Culture, 2019

These notes should not be taken as the presented results of superior insights, let alone of science, but as the desperate confessions of a seeker after salvation, who tells of the inexorable link by which the upward striving of the mind remains tied to the compulsion of projecting bodily causes. 1 (Warburg, 1923) The Purloined Hat