18. L. Carroll and the peculiarities of his book “Alice in Wonderland”

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on Jan. 27, 1832. His early years were happy with his nine sisters and two brothers to whom he frequently made up games and wrote stories. His school years at Rugby (1846-1849) were not so happy because he was shy and often sick. But he was still recognized as a good scholar, and in 1850 he was admitted to Christ Church College in Oxford. He graduated in 1854, and was appointed a mathematical lecturer at the college the following year. This appointment was permanent and recognized his academic superiority which also brought him financial security. The appointment meant that Dodgson had to take orders from the Anglican Church and not get married. In 1861 he was ordained a deacon.Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is written by the English author and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who used a pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The book is commonly referred to by the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland. It has become one of the most famous children's books of all time, one that appeals to children as well as adults. The story tells what happens to a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy world which is populated by peculiar imaginary creatures and objects that come alive and have a personality, like talking playing cards.Alice in Wonderland does not contain obvious moralizing tales like so many children's books nowadays do. It is a delightful adventure story in which a normal, healthy, little girl reacts to the reality of the adult world.

18. The general characteristics of W. M. Thackeray’s literary work. The theme of snobbery. The novel “Vanity Fair” (the meaning of the title and subtitle, the main theme, the peculiar features of narration.).

Thackeray, William Makepeace

Born July 18, 1811, in Calcutta; died Dec. 24,1863, in London. English author.Thackeray is the major representative of what K. Marx called the “brilliant pleiad” of 19th-century English novelists (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 10, p. 648). The son of a wealthy colonial official, Thackeray studied at Cambridge University from 1829 to 1830. He traveled extensively and worked as a journalist for Punch and other publications. He was also a talented cartoonist.Thackeray’s work, while varied in genre (including novels, comic novellas, humoresques, fairy tales, parodies, sketches, and ballads), has a consistent ideology and artistic method. His best works include The Yellowplush Correspondence (1837), the novella Catherine (1840), the cycle of parodies The Snobs of England (1846-47; republished in 1848 as The Book of Snobs;Russian title, Novels of Celebrities), and the novels Vanity Fair (1848), Pendennis (1850), The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. (1852), The Newcomes (1855), and The Virginians (1857). Thackeray’s essays in literary criticism (The English Humorists of the 18th Century, 1853) and his letters are remarkable examples of English prose.Thackeray’s work is critical of the Victorian bourgeois era, combining an understanding of sociohistorical patterns with a vision of life as an unending masquerade. He saw history as a cycle, full of the tragicomic and grotesque (see the letter to his mother of Mar. 10, 1848). His philosophical views were close to those of Montaigne and Hume.Thackeray created a new type of satirical novel. While drawing on European literary traditions (as represented by Aristophanes, Petronius, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and W. Scott), he used special techniques that played with literary conventions yet established a realistic framework. He also used the entire range of devices from folk literature, including motifs from mythology, fairy tales, fables, and the English Christmas pantomimes. In this way, he expanded the possibilities of social satire and deepened the realism of representation. Thackeray’s broadly satirized characters (Yellowplush, Barry Lyndon, Becky Sharp, Lord Steyne, and Barnes Newcome) reveal the depth of man’s alienation in a class-structured society. They are at once socially conditioned and eternal types. In depicting his characters, Thackeray used symbolism, ironic implication, alogism, and parodie stylization, among other devices. He devoted particular attention to developing the semblance of a first-person author, using various pseudonyms (Ike Solomons, Michael Angelo Tit-marsh, and Pendennis). Thackeray’s work enjoyed wide popularity in Russia in the early 1850’s and was supported by the revolutionary-democratic school of criticism.

A snob is someone who believes that some people are inherently inferior to him or her for any one of a variety of reasons, including real or supposed intellect , wealth , education , ancestry , taste , beauty , nationality , etcetera.

The subtitle, A Novel without a Hero, is apt because the characters are all flawed to a greater or lesser degree; even the most sympathetic have weaknesses, for example Captain Dobbin, who is prone to vanity and melancholy. The human weaknesses Thackeray illustrates are mostly to do with greed, idleness, and snobbery, and the scheming, deceit andhypocrisy which mask them. None of the characters are wholly evil, although Becky's psychopathic tendencies make her come pretty close. However, even Becky, who is amoral and cunning, is thrown on her own resources by poverty and its stigma. (She is the orphaned daughter of a poor artist.) Thackeray's tendency to highlight faults in all of his characters displays his desire for a greater level of realism in his fiction compared to the rather unlikely or idealised people in many contemporary novels.

The novel is a satire of society as a whole, characterised by hypocrisy and opportunism, but it is not a reforming novel; there is no suggestion that social or political changes, or greater piety and moral reformism could improve the nature of society. It thus paints a fairly bleak view of the human condition. This bleak portrait is continued with Thackeray's own role as anomniscient narrator, one of the writers best known for using the technique. He continually offers asides about his characters and compares them to actors and puppets, but his scorn goes even as far as his readers; accusing all who may be interested in such "Vanity Fairs" as being either "of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood".

The work is often compared to the other great historical novel which covered the Napoleonic wars: Tolstoy's War and Peace. While Tolstoy's work has a greater emphasis on the historical detail and the effect the war has upon his protagonists, Thackeray instead uses the conflict as more of a backdrop to the lives of his characters. The momentous events on the continent do not always have an equally important influence on the behaviors of Thackeray's characters. Rather their faults tend to compound over time. This is in contrast to the redemptive power conflict has on the characters in War and Peace. For Thackeray, the Napoleonic wars as a whole can be thought of as one more of the vanities expressed in the title.