DVDs of the truly frabjous two-day conference hosted by Jim Kincaid of USC were recently discovered and the videos are now online on our YouTube channel.
“More than 100 years after his death, the Oxford academic Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) continues to capture critical attention for his work as an author and photographer. At “Lewis Carroll and the Idea of Childhood,” held March 31–April 1, 2006 at both USC’s Doheny Memorial Library and the Huntington Library, an international group of scholars presented viewpoints challenging commonly held assumptions about the author and his work. Conference topics included the interpretation of the Alice books as realist novels; the rare appearance of boys in Carroll’s photographic oeuvre; the role of the child in an adult world; the odd recurrence of characters like the Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit; the function of child idolatry in Carroll’s relationship to the real and fictional Alices; the relationship between Carroll’s Alice and Sylvie and Bruno books; the mixing of poetry and prose in Victorian literature; and Alice as a precursor to Dorothy and other heroines who refuse to surrender.”
You can read a write-up called “Aboard the Trojan Horse” from the Knight Letter here. There was much humor and fun to be had, perhaps at odds with what one thinks of as an academic conference.
Thanks to Mark Burstein, Alan Tannenbaum, and Tyson Gaskill for making it happen!
