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In 1876, Dodgson produced his last great work, The Hunting of the Snark, a fantastical “nonsense” poem, exploring the adventures of a bizarre crew of tradesmen, and one beaver, who set off to find the eponymous creature.
Postmodernism is in general the era that follows modernism. It frequently serves as an ambiguous overarching term for skeptical interpretations of culture, literature art. Postmodern works are seen as a reaction against enlightenment thinking and modernist approaches to literature. So the keynote of modernism is full of absurdity, inescapability and chaos because of the background.
Literature postmodernism is explored in this paper to further discuss the themes of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland.
As time go on, children become to be adult finally. So the valuable innocence faded. As growing up, they would confront more menace, such as disease, death. It is so cruel that everyone must experience that. Even if it occurs, we can keep a good state of mind. Dodgson even said: “writing is not for money and fame. I just want to produce some proper and joyous material to them at pure age, and they deserve the kind of merriment. I hope that the tale can provide some thought to others, and the thoughts wouldn’t disjoint with life tempo.”
When he was asked what he ‘meant’ by The Hunting of the Snark , Lewis Carroll replied: “ I’m very much afraid I didn’t mean anything but nonsense! Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I’m glad to accept as the meaning of the book.’’(1958:32)
It is equally important to realize that Lewis Carroll exemplified what G.M. Young has called a ‘new, unpietistic handling of childhood’. There is throughout the Alice books a strongly marked reaction to the edifying, moralizing nursery literature typical of the early nineteenth century. Alice herself, in the fantastic adventures of her dream world, is witness to the virtues of innocence, of level-headed common sense, of patrician courage and dignity; but there is nothing goody-goody in the treatment of her adventures, which, it is essential to remember, were primarily intended to be told to and to give pleasure to children.
2 Inevitable Loss of Innocence
Black humor is a new modernism literature in American literary world. The black humor growing up has relationship with disordered social situation and cultural background.
2.1Black Humor of Postmodernism
The World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War breaks out in succession that made nationals in chaos. Domestic anti-war sentiment upsurges, race contradiction sharpens and social situation worsens. At the same time, American sense of humor is worth greatly in tradition and cultural order fissions. Confronted with the threat of war and capitalism developing fast makes tendency of dehumanization, it is found that the world lacking of logos and order. The world was ridiculous and preposterous. Obviously, the sudden evolution of society makes literature change. Many young novelists are influenced by modernism thought. They present a kind of new notion of existing and aesthetic consciousness. They are high on satire, jeer, weird and exaggeration to respond world’s absurd and ridiculousness, not only reflecting confrontational art trend but also many new means of artistic expression, such as black humor, theater of absurd.
A kind of humor which flourished from the late 1950s through to the 1970s in America, is characterized by morbid or provocative treatment of subjects like death and disease. The typical unit of black humor narratives is the episode, and two of the best exemplars of this mode are Joseph Heller’s Catch and Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The latter dramatizes a pathological sexual obsession with weaponry dominating the US military. Other practitioners include Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bruce Jay Friedman, who edited the anthology Black Humor in 1965. (Birch, 2009:131)