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MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 09/06/2013, SPi 2 Liddell in Wonderland: MI5 and the Prussian Secret Police Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany made little apparent impression on the British security services. According to MI5’s own in-house history, ‘The Nazi threat attracted practically no attention in the Security Service between 1931 and 1933 and very little when Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in Germany.’1 This statement is somewhat disingenuous. In fact, MI5 was keen to cooperate with the new Nazi authorities, with whom it had a common interest
. Should our hero manage, against all the odds, to gain entry to whichever secondary world is in play, that world will have none of the charm, nerve, or sheer imaginative anarchy of Barrie's Neverland. (‘Wonderland’ is, symptomatically, a much-loved and over-used signifier in Barker's fiction. So too is ‘in extremis’.) The secondary world of Barker's post- Books of Blood epics
Since 2005 Tim Burton’s imagination has frequently turned to Victorian-related subjects. Focusing primarily on Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd (2007) and Alice in Wonderland (2010), this article argues that Burton’s response to (neo-) Victorian culture is a distinctly Gothic one. Unlike other more literary and canonical types of neo-Victorianism it engages with the popular and strongly Gothicised conceptions of the Victorian that emerged through the horror cinema of the twentieth century. It is also Gothic in the way that it self-consciously blends the Victorian with other cultural trends. As a result, rather than offering a strongly theorised, academic view of the Victorians, Burton remediates them for his own aesthetic purposes.
Sarah Harriet Burney‘s little-known 1839 novel The Romance of Private Life is a novel that, in many ways, seems to belong to the 1790s, rather than to the early years of Victoria‘s reign. Burney constantly draws attention to both her own works deviance from the Gothic plot, and her reliance on this plot to structure the two stories that comprise the volume. While The Hermitage is arguably the world s first murder mystery, The Renunciation represents a process of thinking through the afterlife of the Gothic plot in a rapidly changing world, anticipating the works of the Brontës and Dickens. The Renunciation represents a conscious reworking of what Italy had come to mean in the early Victorian period, reframing Italy as an artistic wonderland where women were given the means and opportunity to pursue artistic and other independent professional existences. I argue that Burney‘s story represents an ambitious, critically overlooked attempt to reframe the literature of the eighteenth century for a new age.
Michael Winterbottom is the most prolific and the most audacious of British filmmakers in the last twenty years. His television career began in the cutting-rooms at Thames Television, and his first directing experience was on the Thames TV documentaries,
I opened this book with an example of an uncannily allusive moment which brought together two young heroines of children’s literature, C. S. Lewis’s Lucy and Philip Pullman’s Lyra. I’d like to conclude with a discussion of a third heroine, Lewis Carroll’s Alice – or perhaps I should say, Tim Burton’s Alice. Burton’s 2010 film, Alice in Wonderland , is a complexly allusive
filmmaking, in particular the New Waves of France and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. It is important to acknowledge that all of his films employ realism across a variety of styles, genres and historical representations. In this chapter we will focus on Welcome to Sarajevo , Wonderland , In This World and The Road to Guantánamo , with a brief reference to 24 Hour Party People (discussed at greater length in chapter 5 ) as
film that Gilliam originally planned to make in 2001. Tideland , Mitch Cullin’s Gothic tale, was provocative enough in its own right. Cullin’s protagonist is an imaginative young girl who alternates between a fantasy world of talking doll-heads and Alice in Wonderland , and a bizarre reality populated by junkie parents, a sexually tormented taxidermist and a mentally damaged man-child. By turns
in the ‘mad tea-party’ in Alice in Wonderland , of a word or remark that ‘seemed to [Alice] to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English’ (56). The Hatter has a little earlier posed perhaps the most disturbing philosophical question of the nineteenth century, ‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’ (55), and has just been examining a ‘funny watch’ that ‘tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is’ (56). Alice ‘sigh[s] wearily’: ‘I think you might do something better with the time,’ she said, ‘than wasting it in
Wonderland. The conditions for such experiences point to an unsettling conclusion: that the greater the danger to life, the more resistant is the aesthetic effect to context. We turn to visions of desolation in which everyone must die: the singing of the Argentine gaucho in Martín Fierro , the poetics of destruction in Moby-Dick , the epic poem that is Marx’s Capital I . We consider a dying humanity turning to abstraction, an everything that is a nothing, in the pained longing of the Puerto Rican character Bayoán to redeem the world from imperial violence, and in