Representing “Otherness”: Animals in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, and Beyond

In this article, I examine the portrayal of animals in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Dodie Smith’s The One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Specifically, I consider the issue of the alterity (or “otherness”) of animals as a category, and the extent to which this is reflected (or n...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Piu DasGupta
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elen Caldecott & Lucy Cuthew 2025-05-01
Series:Leaf Journal
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ojs.library.lancs.ac.uk/lj/article/view/110
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In this article, I examine the portrayal of animals in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Dodie Smith’s The One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Specifically, I consider the issue of the alterity (or “otherness”) of animals as a category, and the extent to which this is reflected (or not) in these two texts. I then proceed to consider this question in relation to more recent children’s books and my own practice as a writer. This article reflects on and develops, in the context of the specific texts cited above and my personal practice as a writer, the discussion by Mimi Thebo of animal representation in children’s literature in her article ‘Talking Tigers: Concepts of Representational Ethics Applied to Non-Human Characters in Writing Children’s Fiction’.
ISSN:2753-6920