Moreover, Browne marks his individual style by alluding to well-known paintings and presenting alternative animal characters. Except for the surreal images of the heroine, Browne adds some imaginary but text-based images that are not present in Tenniel's version such as separate body parts, aloof facial expressions and even the image of a crying Alice. First of all, challenging Tenniel's iconic illustrations, Browne's work renders a different way to see Alice's story by re-interpreting and visualizing Carroll's text. Being not as abstract and obscure as the volume by Salvador Dali (1969), Browne's surreal Alice is marked by the vivid images and distinctive colors, and intriguingly transcends the recognizable signifiers. He presents an accessible Alice with surreal techniques. As one of the illustrators after Sir John Tenniel, Anthony Browne uses a distinct style in re-illustrating Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1988. Among these efforts and devotions, the re-illustrations in different eras provide noteworthy images demonstrating diverse ways to read, visualize, and represent Carroll's work. They keep adapting, rewriting, and re-illustrating the work owing to its potential for new comprehensions and interpretations. During this time, it creates a wonderland for numerous illustrators, artists, writers, and movie makers. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a classic that has been continuously published for more than 150 years. The paper draws upon resources outlining the reception of Carroll’s book in his time, and attempts to examine the failure of the songs to resonate with today’s ‘audiences’, while other works written at the same time, notably those of Gilbert and Sullivan, have continued to be relevant. While visually, iconic images from Alice may still be employed to satirise people and events, the power of the songs/poems has been lost in transmission, such that they now bemuse rather than amuse. Adaptation for subsequent generations of a book Carroll wrote for an audience who were well-versed in the songs he was parodying, and who were informed about the people and events to whom references were being made, demands interpretation. While the Disney adaptation may take credit for much of the confusion in the modern mind (even to the point where David Crystal accredits the Mad Hatter with the concept of a Happy Unbirthday), we need to look further afield to understand the failure of present-day audience’s to connect with the aesthetic of Carroll’s book. Kenneth Rothwell, in his History of Shakespeare on Screen, lists seven kinds of derivatives a film may take when a literary work is adapted for the screen, none of which presupposes ‘accuracy’ with the original text. It has taken Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland a little over a century from being regarded as nonsense, to become nonsensical, as is so vividly highlighted by the book’s songs/poems.
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