ABSTRACT
There is a sense in which Alice is like Dracula. Not in outward appearance or feeding habits, but in the fact that she belongs to a text that has come to acquire the status of a myth. There are as many signs of this in the case of the Alice books as there are with Bram Stoker’s novel. First, versions of Alice have proliferated across the various media, from stage Alices to Kafkaesque film versions to, horresco referens, pornographic novels based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Second, the tales, in spite of the fact that they have been admitted into the canon of English Literature (in a minor capacity, it is true), have managed to keep remarkably alive, far beyond the range of the professional interest of academics. To the point that one could indulge in the usual game-ask the woman in the street what the name ‘Alice in Wonderland’ suggests to her, and elicit the same sort of response as in the case of ‘Frankenstein’ —the account would be reasonably accurate, except that the name of Walt Disney would have pride of place, over and above Lewis Carroll, even as Boris Karloff tends to overshadow Mary Shelley.
