Through the Modern Adaptation-Glass, and What Alice Found There - The Transformation of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland in Nick Willing’s Alice (2009), and American McGee’s American McGee’s Alice (2000) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011)

This thesis examines the transformation of Wonderland in modern adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). The adaptations explored are Nick Willing’s Alice (2009), and American McGee’s American McGee’s Alice (2000) and its sequel Alice: Madness Returns (2011). The adaptations are all termed ‘new narrative adaptations’, defined as adaptations that feature a new narrative as opposed to adapting the source text’s narrative. The focus of this thesis is the connection between the new narratives and how Wonderland is portrayed, but it also incorporates José Ángel García Landa’s identification of the fact that the perception of a classic work is influenced by its popular readings and interpretations by investigating how this has created a perception of an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ narrative that incorporates more than just Carroll’s novels. The connection between the adaptations’ new narratives and their portrayal of Wonderland is explored using ideas from ecocriticism, in particular Karin Lesnik-Oberstein’s argument that children and nature are inherently linked in Western literature and Don Mitchell’s argument that all landscapes reflect the values and ideologies of those who created them. The thesis finds that the links between the narrative, themes, and Wonderland’s environment are more pronounced in the adaptations, something which de-emphasises Wonderland’s whimsicality, instead creating a darker tone and thereby contributing to establishing a separate identity for the adaptations