The Great Debate: Wonderland vs. Looking-Glass

Watch the Great Alice in Wonderland Debate on YouTube.

Please join us for a delightful discourse you won’t hear anywhere else! Specially-selected Carrollian academics and literary luminaries will take sides and amicably argue once and for all which is the more scholastically significant, culturally compelling, engrossingly eloquent, all-around better book: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass??? Dr. Jan Susina and Charlie Lovett will redoubtably represent Team Wonderland, while Ellie Luchinsky and Brian Sibley formidably fight for Team Looking-Glass. Attendees will have the opportunity to submit debate questions and also vote for their favorite tome at the beginning and end of the proceedings!

Is this event all in good fun? Certainly. Is it also a knock-down dragout contest in which one team will triumphantly emerge victorious, while the other suffers the stinging indignity of defeat? ABSOLUTELY.

Bios

In the Wonderland corner, wearing the waistcoat and checkered pants:

• Jan Susina teaches and researches children’s and adolescent literature and culture, and Victorian literature and culture. His book, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature (Routledge 2009, 2011), examines how the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland significantly changed literature for children as well as publishing.

• Charlie Lovett is a writer, teacher, and playwright whose plays for children have been seen in over 5000 productions worldwide. He served for more than a decade as Writer-in-Residence at Summit School in Winston-Salem, NC. Charlie is the author of the NYT Bestseller THE BOOKMAN’S TALE, and FIRST IMPRESSIONS (A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen). He has a new novel, just published in September, Escaping Dreamland. He is a past president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.

In the Looking-Glass corner, wearing the striped tights and unruly shawl:

• Brian Sibley is author of over 100 hours of radio drama and has written and presented hundreds of radio documentaries, features and weekly programmes. He is widely known as the author of many film “making of” books, including those for the Harry Potter series and The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.

• In 1968, Ellen “Ellie” Luchinsky’s sister gave her The Complete [sic] Works of Lewis Carroll and Ellie’s fate was sealed. Nine years later, she embarked on a 37 year career as a librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where she was the Manager of the Fine Arts Department and later the Humanities Department. When not mystifying her co-workers with obscure Lewis Carroll quotations, she edited The Song Index of the Enoch Pratt Free Library (Garland, 1998).