Alice in Transmedia Wonderland : curiouser and curiouser new forms of a children's classic

What keeps the spirit of Alice alive after all these years? And what makes us so spontaneously turn into armchair travelers ready to unconditionally follow a little girl on her fantastic journeys down a rabbit hole into topsy-turvy worlds?Alice's unfailing ability to amaze is due to her characteristic ambiguity that entails a plethora of interpretive possibilities and hence a rewarding adaptability to multiple mixed media forms which stimulate senses beyond the verbal games establishing the trademark charm of the original children's classic.

Popular postmodern post/millenial re-configurations of Victorian fantasy, in particular late 20st century and especially early 21st century adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice tales, reveal how intermedial transitions elicit different modes of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment which both shape and reflect contemporary fantasists' strategies of make-believing, and circumscribe a metafantasy commenting on limits and potentials of the fantasy genre as well as the dys/functioning of imagination.

Adventures get curiouser and curiouser once Alice ventures into Transmedia Wonderland, transgressing the confines of the written text towards visual, acoustic, tactile, kinetic and digital new media regimes of representation. Contemporary adaptations dynamically interact with their Victorian source texts as well as one another to enhance the immersion into an elaborate fictional universe and maximalize audience engagement, while retelling a story that remains recognizably the same, yet turns radically different with each new retelling.

The journey to Wonderland today signifies a metafantasmagoric, metamedial mission urging all to interactively explore the cultural critical and ethical stakes of our embodied imaginative experience of making sense of nonsense.