Down the Rabbit Hole with David Greetham

Based on a talk given at the Symposium in honor of Dr. Greetham’s retirement, this essay addresses the influence Greetham has had on the author’s scholarship and pedagogy. Lauer describes a project she completed as Greetham’s student in which she analyzed the illustration history of the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She argues that the history of a text’s illustration can be read as a history of publishing intent: just as different annotations suit a text for a particular implied readership, so too do different illustrations. The illustrators of Alice come after each other, not to re-envision the words of Lewis Carroll, but to re-envision the scenes as already represented pictorially. Furthermore, Lauer posits that the creation of different illustrated editions is part of the historical trajectory of versioning. As Greetham says of annotation, illustration, too, is “always contingent and local, for the relationship between text and audience is always changing” (1994, 369).