EXPRESSIVE GRAPHICS AS A COMPONENT OF THE LANGUAGE GAME IN LEWIS CARROLL’S LITERARY FAIRY TALE ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Authors: KOZII Olha 
Published: July 2024

The fairy tale “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll is one of the most popular children’s literary works, which has not lost its relevance for almost 160 years. During this time, the phantasmagoric story was never taken out of print, and was translated into 174 languages.

The main aim of the article is the analysis of graphical stylistic devices in Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, which is a real cultural phenomenon. Linguistic and extra-linguistic devices create the world of the tale.The methodology includes literature review related to the topic; methods of analysis, classification and comparative analysis. It includes the methods of literature analysis of the stylistic role of the word game. As the word game, especially the creation of neologisms, the use of graphic means of highlighting become the ways of designing an original text and an unreal-real world. The analysis of transformations of the artistic language as a means of overcoming the framework of the game space and its inherent closedness extend beyond the analysis of only a visual framework of the text but becomes the study of the main idea if it could be found in this extraordinary piece of literature.

The vast majority of studies devoted to the works of L. Carroll touch upon the problems of the play of words in his works and aspects of the translation experience.

The study of any fiction text inevitably involves the study of the features of its graphic design. It is well-known that graphics is a means of securing information; in a fiction text, where any unit is potentially expressive, graphic means carry a pragmatic load, and therefore are one of the ways to influence the addressee of written speech. An extraordinary way of use of graphics draws the reader’s attention to the form of writing. Thus, the form becomes significant and, interacting with the meaning of the graphically selected lexical unit, makes it semantically more complicated.

The main graphic means of expression include paragraph organization, punctuation marks, numbering, typefaces, combination of fonts of different languages, color selection, underlining, deliberate division into syllables, creation of figurative elements (most often in poetic works of art), etc.

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is a complex and unique fantasy story but usually accepted and interpreted as a fairy tale. This is a kind of allusion to the author’s modern world. The artistic world lives according to its own laws. Many characters and episodes of the book, funny lines and situations are not random, but deeply motivated: they are fully based on the play of words, on the revival of metaphors, on the literal interpretation of components, phraseological combinations and puns.

The author’s text of the fairy tale can be defined as a game and two main principles of its formation can be identified, namely: the creation of unusual language material and its non-standard (non-linear) organization of the text.

Among the indicated graphic means of expression, L. Carroll’s work is primarily characterized by font selection (capital letters and italics), deliberate division of words into syllables, and the creation of figurative verse.

It is concluded that the general peculiarity of L. Carroll’s fairy tale is the extremely high artistic value of the work, which is manifested in the wealth of stylistic means and techniques and is ambiguously perceived by readers due to the structure of the text itself. The writer’s attitude to the interaction between the text and the reader is important. The latter’s perception of the text will be qualitatively different depending on whether the reader understands the playful nature of the work or perceives it as an ordinary text. The elements of the game are the characters, the narrative style of the work, and the language tools used by the author at different levels