ABSTRACT
Published in the aftermath of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871) did not respond directly, of course, to the scientific evolutionary debate of the time, but only through the subterfuge of fantasy, since Carroll used his Alice texts as spaces of exploration on the possibilities and implications of a post-Darwinian understanding of the culture (nurture)/nature controversy and its impact on child development and behavior. Inundated with numerous land, sea and flying animal characters, whose names/signifiers are all written with a capital first letter and thus being endowed with full character status in a world of subversion where nothing seems to be the way it looks, the Alice books pose fundamental questions of (child) identity formation, self-discovery processes, power relation tactics and regimes, representation, Otherness and desire in the realm of fantasy.
