Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror-Worlds of Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon

by Beverly Lyon Clark

In Victorian England non-realistic fiction was largely forced underground, with Alice, into such marginal fiction as fantasy for children. Only now is fantasy beginning to receive the attention it deserves, in both fiction and literary criticism. Beverly Lyon Clark's Reflections of Fantasy extends recent theoretical work on fantasy by exploring the technique of the mirror-world. Tracing the fantasy mirror-world in Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon allows Clark to shed light on the dialectic central to fantasy, that between the real and the not-real, and also on Victorian and contemporary views of fictional reality, on the use of metaphoric and metonymic modes, on the ramifications of self-consciousness. She explores these themes in analyses of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Anya v stranye chudes, Pale Fire, Ada, and The Crying of Lot 49.

195 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1986

About the author

Dr. Beverly Lyon Clark is a Professor of English at Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts, with a particular interest in feminist theory and children's literature. She received her BA from Swarthmore College, and her Ph.D from Brown University.