Alice, Water-Babies and critics quotes Flashcards
AIW getting bigger, threat of growth
‘opening out like the largest telescope that ever was’ ‘and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken’
AIW childhood stories
‘would keep … her childhood … and make THEIR eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale’
AIW word play, violence
‘You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis - “Talking of axes … chop off her head!”’
AIW getting smaller
‘shutting up like a telescope’
TTLG last narrator line
‘Which do YOU think it was?’
TTLG last poem line
‘Life, what is it but a dream?’
Gillian Beer, multiple meanings
‘for children the pristine multiples of meaning hiding within the single word release a rush of energy’
Gillian Beer, play
‘this is not systematic fiction. It is a field of play’
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, darwinisn views
‘very much in the air, a pervading bad smell’
Gillian Beer says Darwinism
‘requires that we acknowledge change and divergence as the ordering principle of life’
TWB Tom awakens to being
‘3.87902 inches long and having round the parotid region of his fauces a set of external gills’
TWB animal category Tom is
‘quite amphibious’
TWB, on not understanding the word ‘amphibious’
‘You do not know what that means? You had better, then, ask the nearest Government pupil-teacher’
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice, nature is dangerous
‘natural world … revealed to be a place of bloody struggle and trauma’
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice, plants and kids are similar
‘idea common among Victorian educationalists that children shared many characteristics with plants: naturally beautiful and wild, it took time and effort in a nursery to train them in the right direction’
