The Children's Book Of Art

He moved from conscious social or practical purpose to comic subversion and new perspectives. Carroll pointed toward specialized and diverse audiences developing for fiction-for instance, children, nostalgic adults, teachers, child-rearers, academics, logicians, and intellectuals-and also toward the complicated and various motives that bring one to read and write fiction. (One motive that became important in the developing countercultural tradition in art would be to turn outsiders into insiders, giving them the last laugh.) The motives and circumstances behind the making of Alice let us see how the the reading public was fragmenting into special groups and also into what we might call a collection of myriad-minded, private reading selves. The child as subject and the literary transaction were for Carroll ends, rather than means. Paradoxically, therefore, this outwardly orthodox, but odd, little-girl-struck author of what may have been the favorite children's book of the century helped to rid fiction of its heavy load of Victorian moral baggage and move it toward something like sovereign play in and for itself-pleasure for pleasure's sake and art for art's sake too ...»