Alice in Wonderland For the CSET

Whether you are studying for the CSET English or the CSET Multiple Subjects exam, you need to know a little about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The analysis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland below will help you answer just about any question thrown at you dealing with the most famous children’s story ever written.

If you are studying for the CSET English, make particular note of how the buzz words: theme, rhetorical devices, parody, foreshadowing, and puns– are being used in the analysis of this work. If you can work these buzz words into your contructed response answer that deals with the analysis of some piece of literature, you will score big points.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written in 1865 by a man named Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (British) using the pseudonym (pen name) Lewis Carroll.

The book is often referred to by the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has a sequel called Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

Carroll wrote two versions of his story-one for older children and one for younger children. The version of the story that he wrote for younger children is called The Nursery “Alice”.

The story is usually classified as a tale, sometimes fantasy, but most certainly children’s literature.

It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy realm populated by talking playing cards and anthropomorphic (the attribution of human characteristics and qualities to non-human beings, a form of personification) creatures.

The tale is filled with satirical (exposes the follies of its subject (for example, individuals, organizations, or states) to ridicule) allusions to Dodgson’s friends and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were expected to memorize.

Read this Wikipedia article on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland then return to this lesson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_In_Wonderland

Summary

A girl named Alice is bored while on a picnic with her older sister. She finds interest in a passing white rabbit, dressed in a waistcoat and muttering “I’m late!”, whom she follows down a rabbit-hole, floating down into a dream underworld of paradox, the absurd and the improbable. As she attempts to follow the rabbit, she has several misadventures. She grows to gigantic size and shrinks to a fraction of her original height; meets a group of small animals stranded in a sea of her own previously shed tears; gets trapped in the rabbit’s house when she enlarges herself again; meets a baby which changes into a pig, and a cat which disappears leaving only his