Whatever you write seriously is taken as a joke, and whatever you mean as a joke is taken seriously: A study of Carnival and nonsense in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno concluded

Abstract

The main aim of this thesis is to analyze carnivalesque features and images underlying Lewis Carroll’s works Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). To this end, I have considered the paradigm of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work Rabelais and His World (1960), taking into account the definition about carnival and the carnivalized literature he provides. Hence, elements such as billingsgate, the celebration of death or acts of uncrowning will be considered. I also comment on children’s literature in the Victorian period and mainly nonsense English literature which proliferated during this era, where some features of the carnivalesque described by Bakthin can be observed.