Remembering Morton Cohen

 I was saddened to learn of the passing of Morton Cohen at age 96 who obituary is in The New York Times. Cohen was the premiere Lewis Carroll scholar. He edited the two-volume The Letters of Lewis Carroll, with assistance from Roger Lancelyn Green, which was published in 1979. Cohen's Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995, is the definitive biography on the Victorian author, photographer, and mathematician. 

Cohen was a classic researcher and scholar. While Cohen published many works on Carroll, the edited Letters and the biography form the basis for serious Lewis Carroll scholarship. 

I was fortunate to meet Cohen on several occassions through the meetings of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. He was formal,  but friendly. He seemed be a man steeped in Victorian culture. 

Cohen was also well known for significant work on H. Rider Haggard.

After a lifetime of researching Lewis Carroll, Cohen wrote his definitive Lewis Carroll: A Biography. Click here or on the title to a link of a .pdf of my book review of Cohen's biography: "On a First-Name Basis with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson" published in Children's Literature 26. 

Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers & ISU connections, an interview on WGLT

Thanks to Judy Valente for her delightful interview of me on WGLT about Mary Poppins as both a delightful filmJulie Andrews as Mary Poppins and P. L. Travers, author of the book and a popular children's book as well as a small, but interesting connection of ISU to P. L. Travers. Judy is such a great interviewer.

Disney's Mary Poppins film was released 50 years ago this week. As we learned in the recent Disney film Saving Mr. Banks, P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins series, was never happy with the adaptation. Pamela Travers was opinionated, but thoughtful, and certainly had a wide range of interests including Zen Buddhism and mytical Sufism. 

In the WGLT interview, Judy asks why Mary Poppins, the film, has such a long-standing appeal with both adults and children. I think that it is partly because Travers understood that children whose lives are in even a small amount of dissarray fantasize about order and everything working out. But it is also because Walt Disney understood the humor and charm of the story and could add the studio's magic to make it wonderful entertainment. Finally, the film causes adults to not only reflect back on their childhood but to consider how they are as parents; are they fulfilling their own hopes and dreams for their family?  The film is more complicated than we perhaps realized when we saw it as children, but that, in turn, makes seeing it again just as fulfilling.

Thanks, again, to Judy Valente for the opportunity to thoughtfully reflect on the delightful film as it turns 50.

Blancanieves

At the EbertFest film festival last weekend in Champaign, one of the highlights was Blancanieves -- a fascinating rethinking of the Grimm Brothers' Snow White.  Before the screening, director Pablo Berger told the audience that films were like dreams to him, and nightmares, too.  Berger, who worked on the film for eight years, re-interpreted the famous tale to take place in Spain during the 1920s.  He focused on the parents of Snow White.  The father is a famous bullfighter and the mother is a singer and flamenco dancer.  Their daughter, Snow White, has a rather tragic childhood but emerges triumphant as a bullfighter herself traveling with 6 smaller people she encounters whie escaping her evil step-mother.

The film was shot in black and white and is silent as well, although the beautiful, moody, original score, by Alfonso de Vilallonga, contributes significantly to the story's success.  During the Q and A afterward, Berger and the panelists discussed how contemporary black-and-white films can capitalize on contemporary audiences' ability to quickly comprehend visual cues and quick editing techniques.  Consequently, Berger puts so much to be 'read' visually on screen that the absence of hearing dialogue does distract in Blancanieves.

I was so impressed with the film that I quickly wrote to ask Marvels & Tales if I could review it for the fairy tale journal and just learned that that's going to be possible.  So I'll post more on that later.

Nice Review of Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature in IRSCL

Thanks to Elisabeth R. Gruner of the University of Richmond, for the positive, thoughtful review of The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature in the review section of the International Research Society of Children's Literature website . Gruner writes that she found "particularly enlightening" the chapter comparing the social class differences bewteen Alice and Hesba Stretton's Jessica's Last Prayer and the similar class issues in Victorian Britian between coffee and tea. Gruner writes:

Susina’s great contribution here, it seems to me, is that by situating the Alice books alongside Jessica’s First Prayer—by setting up the tea-or-coffee dichotomy—he is able to make an important claim about the oft-repeated truism that Wonderland “almost single-handedly helped to revise the nature of children’s literature in the nineteenth century” (108). It did so, Susina here claims, by ignoring poor children.

I appreciate that Gruner understands the interesting issues that ensue as Carroll's imaginative book becomes rises in popularity among critics while the didactic social tracts, such as Jessica's First Prayer, is dismissed.

Gruner continues that, "Susina does not rest here, however—the book as a whole goes on to provide interesting links between Alice and the Christmas pantomime tradition and, in the last three chapters, the Alice books and many of the larger trends in children’s consumer culture today."

Thanks again for the great review.  It's much appreciated!

Lewis Carroll book now available in paperback

My book, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature, is now available in a paperback edition -- and at aThe Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature is available in paperback. lower price! Go to Amazon to get your copy.

I am thrilled that the Lewis Carroll book is in paperback because I think it will make it more accessible to scholars and readers, particularly those that can't access the library version.

Thanks to Routledge for bringing it out in paperback.

If you have a good comment, please consider posting it on the Amazon website.  Everything helps.

Thanks to the great reviews the book has already received.  These include Dorothy G. Clark's review in The Lion and the Unicorn (April 2010) and Claire Imholtz review in the Winter 2010 issue of The Knight Letter, which is The Newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. Rod McGillis also had a kind review in Children's Literature, and I'll post on that soon.