Almansi, Daniela. “Gate-Keeping and Gate-Crashing in Nonsense and Translation. The case of fiddle-de-dee: Do you know languages?” CTIS Occasional Papers 6 (2010): 41-53.

_______________. “Nonsensing Translation: How to Turn the Spotlight on the Blind Spots of Interpretation.”Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 53.3 (2015): 56-65. Abstract here.

Andersen, Jorgen. “Edward Lear and the Origin of Nonsense.” English Studies, 31 (1950): 161-166.

Andricíková, Markéta and Timotea Vráblová. “The liberating power of nonsense in Slovak children’s poetry.” Bookbird. 49. 2 (2011): 25-32.

Antinucci, Raffaella.”Sensational nonsense: Edward Lear and the (Im)purity of Nonsense Writing.” English Literature. 2:2 (December 2015): 291-311. Web.

Antinucci, Raffaella. “Parodic Brachyology and Semantic Density in Edward Lear’s ‘Volcanic’ Italian Limericks.” Conversations: La Revue des Etudes Bachyologiques 8 (2019): 235-44.

Baker, William, “T.S. Eliot on Edward Lear: An Unnoted Attribution,” English Studies, 64 (1983): 564-566.

Banerjee, Sreeradha. “Elements of Social Concern and Absurdity in Non-Sense Poetry of the Late-Victorian Period.” Literary Spectrums: Recent Studies in English Literature. Ed. Mukhopsfhysy, Partha Kumar. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2007

Bardin, Gay. “The Poetics of Nullity: “Nonsense” Verses of William of Aquitaine, Jaufre Rudel, and Raimbaut D’Orange.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 34 (2003): 1-23.

Barton, Anna. “Boz, Ba and Derry Down Derry: Names and Pseudonyms in Victorian Literature.” Literature Compass. 6.3 (2009), 799-809.

____________.“Delirious Bulldogs and Nasty Crockery: Tennyson as Nonsense Poet.” Victorian Poetry. 1 (2009): 313–330.

____________. “Doubtful Girls and Silly Woman: Nonsense and Gender.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 247-263.

____________. “Literary Nonsense.” Oxford Bibliographies. Web. 2017. (a sample ishere).

Barton, Anna, and Catherine Bates. “‘Beautiful Things’: Nonsense and the Museum.” In Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities. Edited by Jonathan Shears and Jen Harrison, 49–65. Nineteenth Century. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2013.

Bedamatta, Urmishree. “Playing with Nonsense: Toward Language Bridging in a Multilingual Classroom” (Children’s Literature in English Language Education, 1: May, 2013). This is about the use of nonsense as a bridge between languages in Indian classrooms. Web.

Bera, Atanu. “Translating Bangla Nonsense: A Vindication.” Journal of the Department of English, Vidyasagar University. Vol. 10. 2012-2013. (22-34). Web.

Bevis, Matthew. “Aspects of Edward Lear,” Part I, Part 2, Part III, Part IV. This is a blog about the Lear collection at the Houghton Library at Harvard.

______________. A video interview on “Nature Live” with Bevis, who is quickly becoming the Lear expert of note. Interview is here. 

_____________. “Edward Lear’s Lines of Thought.” Journal of the British Academy, 1, 31–69. 2013. This was the Chatterton Lecture on Poetry read 1 November 2012.

_____________. four talks listed, videos and radio interviews.

Bhadury, Poushali. “Fantastic Beasts and How to Sketch Them: The Fabulous Bestiary of Sukumar Ray.” in South Asian Review. 34:1 (2013) 11-38. Web.

Bhattacharya, Hirak. “Rethinking Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol as a Multimodal Text.” Bookbird: A Journal of INterantional Children’s Litearture. 59.1 (2021): 64-69.

Bouissac, Paul. “Decoding Limericks: A Structuralist Approach.” Semiotica, 19 (1977): 1-12.

Bourbon, Brett. “The ‘Twitterlitter’ of Nonsense: Askesisat Finnegans Wake.” James Joyce Quarterly 2 (2002): 217–232.

Brendel, Alfred. “On Humour, Sense and Nonsense.” Music, Sense and Nonsense: Collected Essays and Lectures. London: Robson Press, 2015. pp. 431-36.

Bruni Roccia, Gioiella. “Edward Lear’s Metaphorical Mind: A Cognitive Approach to A Book of Nonsens.” RSV: Revista di Studi Vittoriani. 34-5 (2013), 101-18.

Burgess, Anthony. “Sense About Nonsense.” New York Times, Sept. 6, 1987.

Byrom, Thomas. Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977.

Cammaerts, Emile. The Poetry of Nonsense. London: Routledge, 1925.

Cazden, Norman. “Introduction.” in A Book of Nonsense Songs. ed. Norman Cazden. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1961.

Chanda, Anurima. “Postcolonial Responses to the Western Superhero: A Study though Indian Nonsense Literature.” Lapis Lazuli. 5:1, 2015. Web.

_______________. “Who Eats Whom?: Transcending the Real Purpose Behind Food Events in Children’s Literature (If Any!) Through Nonsense Literature.” Food Culture Studies in India. Dec. 2020. pp 31-41.

Charlton, W. “Nonsense.” The British Journal of Aesthetics. 17.4 (1977): 346-360.

Chesterton, G.K., “A Defence of Nonsense,” in The Defendant (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914), pp. 42–50. Web.

Chiarini, Sara. “In Search of Ancient Greek Nonsense.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 129-144.

Chitty, Susan. That Singular Person Called Lear. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988.

Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, Elżbieta. “Humorous Nonsense and Multimin British and American Children’s Poetry.” European Journal of Humour Research 3.3 (2017): 25-42

Cock, Emily. “‘Nonsence is Rebellion’: John Taylor’s Nonsence upon Sence, or Sence, upon Nonsence (1651–1654) and the English Civil War.” Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 2 (2014): 1-23.

Colley, Ann C.. “Animals and Nonsense: Edward Lear’s Menagerie.” The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. Eds. McHugh, Susan, Robert McKay and John Miller. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 333-346.

__________. Edward Lear and the Critics. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993.

_________. “Edward Lear’s Limericks and the Reversals of Nonsense.” Victorian Poetry, 29 (1988): 285-299.

_________. “The Limerick and the Space of Metaphor,” Genre, 21 (Spring 1988): 65-91.

_________. “Edward Lear’s Anti-Colonial Bestiary.” Victorian Poetry. 30.2 (1992), 109-20.

_________. “Edward Lear and Victorian Animal Portraiture.” RSV: Rivista di Studi Vittoriani. 34-5 (2013), 11-26.

Cronin, Richard. “Edward Lear and Tennyson’s Nonsense,” in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, eds. Tennyson among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 259-75.

Cuddon, J.A., ed., revised by C.E. Preston, “Nonsense.” A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976, 1998), pp. 551–58.

Cunningham, Valentine. Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Davidson, Angus. Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet. London: John Murray, 1938.

de Bruijn, Annette. “Never Do What Your Mother Tells You to Do”: Nonsense and the Interrogative Function in Annie M. G. Schmidt’s Children’s Poetry.” in Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 53.3 (2015): 20-27. Abstract here.

Deleuze, Gilles.The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas. London: The Athlone Press, (French version 1969), 1990.

de Oliveira, Cassio. “Literary Nonsense in Daniil Kharms’s Incidents.” Slavonica. 16:2 (2010): 65-78.

Dilworth, Thomas. “Edward Lear’s Suicide Limerick,” The Review of English Studies, 184 (1995): 535-38.

________________. “Lear’s Italian Limericks.” RSV: Rivista di Studi Vittoriani. 34-5 (2013), 51-78.

________________. “Society and the Self in the Limericks of Lear,” The Review of English Studies, 177 (1994): 42-62.

Dolitsky, Marlene. Under the Tumtum Tree: From Nonsense to Sense. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984.

Dubois, Martin. “Edward Lear’s India and the Colonial Production of Nonsense.” Victorian Studies. 61.1 (2018): 35-59.

_____________. “Victorian Nonsense and Its Kinships” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 81-97.

Ede, Lisa S., “The Nonsense Literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll”. unpublished PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 1975.

_________. “Edward Lear’s Limericks and Their Illustrations.” Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, ed. Wim Tigges (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), pp. 101–116.

_________. “An Introduction to the Nonsense Literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll” in Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, ed. Wim Tigges (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), pp. 47–60.

Ehrenpreis, Anne Henry. “Edward Lear Sings Tennyson Songs.” Harvard Literary Bulletin. 27.1 (1979), 65-85.

Flescher, Jacqueline, “The language of nonsense in Alice,” Yale French Studies, 43 (1969–70): 128-44

Geo, Vimsy. The Tenth Rasa: A Critical Enquiry into Nonsense Literature and its Therapeutic Powers. unpub. Master’s dissertation, Assumption College, Mahatma Gandhi University, 2013. Web.

Giammei, Alessandro. “Nonsense-verse Made in Italy.” il verri 60 (2016): 1-13.

___________________. “Italian Nonsense: Tradition, Translation, Translocation, Transcodification (and a Trinity).” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 199-216.

Ginzburg, Etti Gordon. “Edward Lear’s American ‘Sister’: The Nonsense Poetry of Laura E. Richards Reconsidered.” in Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth Century American Women’s Encounters With Italy and the Atlantic World. University of New Hampshire Press, 2016.

___________________.“Genre, Gender and Canon Formation: The Case of Laura Richards.” Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Müller, Routledge, 2017, 141–154.

___________________. “There Once Was a Lady Called Laura”: Laura E. Richards’s Nonsense Poetry.” Childhood: A Journal for the Study and Research of Children’s Literature. Vol. 1. 2015: (176-187).

Graziosi, Marco, “The Limerick” on Edward Lear Home Page. Web.

Greer, Jennifer. “‘All sorts of pitfalls and surprises’; Competing Views of Idealized Girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books.” Children’s Literature 31 (2003): 1-24.

Guiliano, Edward, “A Time for Humor: Lewis Carroll, Laughter and Despair, and The Hunting of the Snark.” Lewis Carroll: A Celebration, ed. Edward Guiliano (New York, 1982), pp. 123–131.

Haight, M.R., “Nonsense,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 11 (1971): 247-56.

Hancock, Cecily Raysor. “Musical Notes to The Annotated Alice.” Children’s Literature. 16. 1 (1988): 1-29.

Hark, Ina Rae, Edward Lear. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

_________. “Edward Lear: Eccentricity and Victorian Angst.” Victorian Poetry, 16 (1978): 112-122.

Hassett, Constance W.. “Does it Buzz?’: Image and text in Edward Lear’s Limericks.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 45.4. Dec. 2017. pp. 685-707.

Haughton, Hugh. “Introduction” in The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry. ed. Hugh Haughton. Chatto & Windus, 1988. 1-32.

______________. “Queer Nonsense: Query?” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 264-280.

Henchman, Anna. “Edward Lear Dismembered: Word Fragments and Body Parts.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 35.5 (2013): 479-87.

Heyman, Michael, “A New Defense of Nonsense; or, ‘Where is his phallus?’ and other questions not to ask.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly,Winter 1999-2000. Volume 24, Number 4 (186-194)

_________. “An Indian Nonsense Naissance.” The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense, edited by Michael Heyman, with Sumanyu Satpithy and Anushka Ravishankar. New Delhi: Penguin, 2007.

_________.“Anushka Ravishankar’s Indian Nonsense.”The Horn Book.82: 6 (2006): 675-6.Web

_________. “Introduction.”Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 53.3 (2015): 5-8. Excerpt here.

_________. Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear in Context.PhDdissertation, University of Glasgow, 1999.[pdf]

_________. “Literary Nonsense as Enactment of Alan Watts’ Philosophy: ‘Not Just Blathering Balderdash'” in The Relevance of Alan Watts in Contemporary Culture: Understanding Contributions and Controversies. Ed. Peter J. Columbus. Routledge, 2021. 159-183.

__________. “Musical Foundations of Nonsense.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 231-246.

_________. “‘That Terrible Bugaboo’: the role of music in poetry for children.” The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Verse in English. Eds. Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. pp. 162-181. A defense of Edward Lear as musician and a discussion of his “Yonghy Bongy Bò” in terms of the music he wrote for it.

_________. “The Original Interactive Multimedia Game: Edward Lear’s Literary Nonsense.” The Five Owls. 15.4 (2001): 81-84. Web.

_________.”The Perils and Nonpereils of Literary Nonsense Translation.” Words Without Borders. 2014. Web.  

_________. “Pigs, pastures, pepper pickers, pitchforks: Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and the tall tale.” in European Journal of Humour ResearchVol. 5. No. 3. (2017): 56-67. Web.

Heyman, Michael and Kevin Shortsleeve. “Nonsense.” Keywords for Children’s Literature. NYU Press, 2011.

Hilbert, Richard A., “Approaching Reason’s Edge: ‘Nonsense’ as the Final Solution to the Problem of Meaning.” Sociological Inquiry, 47.1 (1977): 25-31.

Hofer, Philip, and Randall Thompson. “The Yonghy Bonghy Bò.” Harvard Literary Bulletin. 15.3 (1967): 229-237.

Holdquist, Michael. “What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism.” in Peter Brooks, ed. The Child’s Part (pp. 145-64). Boston: Beacon Press.

Houghton Library (Harvard) has the largest collection of Edward Lear material in the world, including thousand of paintings, letter, manuscripts, travel journals, and his personal diaries. The guide to their holdings of his landscape art can be found here. See also Matthew Bevis’s blog on the collection, “Aspects of Edward Lear,” Part I, Part 2, Part III, Part IV.

In 2011, the Harvard Literary Bulletin put out a catalog of their vast Lear holdings, with biographical essays. The Edward Lear Collection at Harvard University: Essays, A Checklist of the Incomparable Collection, and an Exhibition Catalog on the Occasions of the 200th Anniversary of Lear’s Birth. Summer-Fall, 2011. 22: 2-3.

Huxley, Aldous, “Edward Lear,” in On the Margin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1923), pp. 167–172

Jackson, Holbrook. “Masters of Nonsense” in All manner of folk; interpretations and studies. London: G. Richards, 1912. Web.

Joardar, Koushik. “Reading Sukumar Ray: Why I Like Nonsense.” Language and Grammar. Eds. Chakrabarti, Bhattacharya and Koushik Joardar. New Delhi: Northern Book Center, 2009.

Johnston, Freya. “Nonsense in the Age of Reason.” in in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 47-59.

Jordison, Sam. “I’m talking nonsense. In a good way.” in The Guardian books blog. 15 Nov. 2007. Web. (on Frank Key)

Keck, Michaela. “A Shared Passion for Nonsense: Laura E. Richards and Margaret Atwood.” European Journal of American Studies 19-4 (2024). Web.

Kharlamova, S. A. “Transformation of English Victorian Nonsense in the 20th Century: Lewis Carroll and John Lennon.” Philological Class 1 (2019): 165-69.

Khasawneh, Hana F. The Dynamics of Nonsense Literature: 1846-1940. Unpublished PhD thesis. The University of Sussex. 2008. Web.

Kirk, Jordan. “Buba, Blictrix, Bufbaf: Medieval Theory and Practice of Nonsense” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.  13-30.

Laird, Holly A. “Nonsense! From Carroll and Lear, through Wilde and Sitwell to the Postmodern,” Part 1, Section 1, Chapter 2, in The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature. Ed. Michael Y. Bennett. Routledge, 2024. 

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Bêtise du limerick.” Humoresques 42 (2015-2017): 63-74. (French)

____________________.”Le nonsense entre image et texte.” Image [&] Narrative 19.2 (2018): 51-60. (French)

___________________. Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. London, New York: Routledge, 1994.

___________________. “Syntaxe et Nonsense.” Linx 10 (1984): 146-53.

___________________. “‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’: Poétique du nonsense.” Études anglaises 57.1 (2004): 92-102.

____________________. “Translate it, translate it not.” Translation Studies. 1.1 (2008): 90-102. Starting with the impossibility of translating nonsense, moving towards “total translatability.” Indeed!!

Lehmann, John, Edward Lear and his World. Norwich: Thames and Hudson, 1977.

Lehman, Robert S. “Original Nonsense: James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, and Modernism’s Genius.” Modernism / modernity 27.2 (2020): 339-60.

Levinovitz, Alan. “Slaying the Chinese Jabberwock: Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Nonsense.” in Comparative Literature. 69.3 (2017): 251-270. Abstract here.

Lodge, Sara. Inventing Edward Lear. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019.

___________. “My Dear Daddy: Edward Lear and William Holman Hunt.” RSV: Rivista di Studi Vittoriani. 34-5 (2013), 79-99.

___________. “One of the Dumms”: Lear, deafness and the wound of sound,” Victorian Poetry. 58.2. 2020. p. 121-133.

Lukes, Alexandra. “‘What’s the French for fiddle-de-dee?’: Nonsense in French.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 182-198.

Lushetich, Natasha. “‘Ludus Populi’: The Practice of Nonsense.” Theatre Journal 63.1 (2011): 23-41

Lyons, A. K., T.R. Lyons, and M. J. Preston. A Concordance to the Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1980.

Makins, Marian W. “Latin, Greek, and Other Classical ‘Nonsense’ in the Work of Edward Lear.” in Classical Reception and Children’s Literature: Greece, Rome and Childhood Transformation. Eds. Hodkinson, Owen and Helen Lovatt. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018. 203-25.

Malcolm, Noel, The Origins of English Nonsense. London: Fontana/HarperCollins, 1997.

Marques Granato, Fernanda, and Vera Bastazin. “On the Edge of Sense: Nonsense and Paradox in Edward Lear’s and Qorpo Santo’s Selected Works.” Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies 74.1 (2021): 82-113. [link]

Masud, Noreen. “Shady Pleasures: Modernist Nonsense.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 89-113.

Mays, Michael. “Finnegan’s Wake, Colonial Nonsense, and Postcolonial History.” College Literature3 (1998): 20–34.

McGillis, Roderick, “Nonsense.” A Companion to Victorian poetry, ed. by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony Harrison. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 155-170.

Menninghaus, Winfried. In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard. Trans. Henry Pickford. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Milly, Edmund “Nonsense and Trauma in the Works of Mervyn Peake.” unpublished Master’s research paper, 2013. Web. To claim that Peake was only “ostensibly” writing for children starts this on a wrong foot or three (children think about death and darkness too), but there is much that is good here–and scholarship on Peake’s nonsense is rare.

Minslow, Sarah. “Challenging the Impossibility of Children’s Literature: The Emancipatory Qualities of Edward Lear’s Nonsense.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 53.3 (2015): 46-55. Abstract here.

Nagai, Kaori. “Animal Alphabets: Chesterton’s Dog, Browning’s Rats, Lear’s Blue Baboon.” Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 155-87.

Neill, Anna. “Developmental Nonsense in the Alice Tales.” Style. Vol 47, No. 3. Fall 2013.

Nel, Philip. Dr. Seuss: American Icon. Bloomsbury, 2003.

Nilsson, Margaret Wallace.“Better a Railing at the Top of the Cliff than a Hospital at the Bottom!”: The use of Edward Lear’s nonsense ABC as a didactical tool in the development of pronunciation skills in young learners of English. Kristianstad University, Spring 2011. Unpub. essay.

Noakes, Vivien, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, 1968. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, revised edition 1979.

_________. Edward Lear, 1812-1888. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.

Nock, S. A., “Lacrimae Nugarum: Edward Lear of the Nonsense Verses,” Sewanee Review, 49 (1941): 68-81.

“Nonsense Pure And Simple” The Spectator. Nov. 3, 1888. 1503-1504. Web. A response to Strachey’s article “Word-Twisting versus Nonsense.” This article is on a beta site, and the transliteration of the text is seriously faulty. Rather than read the type, be sure to click on the pdf pages, the original pages.

“Nonsense Verse” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. pp. 950-951.

Nöth, Winfried, “The Art of Self-Reference in Edward Lear’s Limericks” inInterdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis. 10.1, (2005) 47-66. Web.

 

________________. “A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium”: Time, nonsense, and humour in the works of Edward Gorey” Web.

 

Nuttall, Jenni. “On gibberish: Babies babble, medieval rustics sing ‘trolly-lolly’, and jazz exults in bebop. What does all this wordplay mean for language?” Aeon. 21 May, 2020. Web.

Orero, Pilar. The Problem of Translating “Jabberwocky.” The Nonsense Literature of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear and their Spanish Translators. Lewiston, NY; Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.

Orwell, George, “Nonsense Poetry.” Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. London: Secker and Warburg, 1950. pp. 179–184. Web.

Osgood Field, William B., Edward Lear on my Shelves. New York: Privately Printed, 1933.

Parham, Maggie. “What We Choose It To Mean.” The New Statesman and Society. 4.135 (1991): 36-37.

Parsons, Marnie. Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry. Theory/Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Park, Ed. “The Dream Life: Edward Gorey’s silent screenplay of an unmade film” Moving Image Source. 2009. Web.

Partridge, E., “The Nonsense Words of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll,” in Here, There and Everywhere: Essays Upon Language, 2nd revised edition. London: Hamilton, 1978.

Petermann, Emily. “Sounds Like Nonsense: Elements of Orality in American Nonsense Literature,”  in Literature and Music.  eds. Inge Arteel & Bruno Forment. Academia Press, (47-64). Explores the orality of Carl Sandburg and James Whitcomb Riley and helps define, along with Heyman, an American style of nonsense as distinct from the British. Web.

________________. “The Child’s Death as Punishment or Nonsense? Edward Gorey’s ‘The Gashlycrum Tinies’ (1963) and the Cautionary Verse Tradition.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 56.4 (2018): 22-30.

Pierce, Joanna Tapp. “From Garden to Gardener: The Cultivation of Little Girls in Carroll’s Alice Books and Ruskin’s ‘of queens’ gardens.'” Women’s Studies 29.6 (2000): 741-61.

Piette, Adam. “Mid-Centry Nonsense and Destructive Mockery.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 114-128.

Pitcher, George. “Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll.” Massachusetts Review 3 (1965): 591–611.

Potter, Michael. “Nonsense Among the Philosophers.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 300-310.

Prickett, Stephen, Victorian Fantasy. Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1979.

Rammel, Hal. Nowhere In America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Rann, James. “Signs and Wonders: Two Approaches to Nonsense in Russia.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.  163-181.

Reichertz, Ronald. The Making of the Alice Books. Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier Children’s Literature. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

Reider, John. “Edward Lear’s Limericks: The Function of Children’s Nonsense Poetry.” Children’s Literature. 26 (1998): 47-61.

Reike, Alison, The Senses of Nonsense. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.

Robinson, Fred Miller, “Nonsense and Sadness in Donald Barthelme and Edward Lear,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 80 (1981): 164-76.

Rother, James. “Modernism and the Nonsense Style.” Contemporary Literature2 (1974): 187–202.

Satpathy, Sumanyu. “The Illogic of Fantasy and Nonsense: The Indian Context.” Indian Literature 59.1 (2015): 165-78.

_________________. “Traditional Mooring, Modern Practices: Indian Literary Nonsense” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 145-162.

Saukkola, Mirva. “The Eden of Dreams and the Nonsense Land: Characteristics of the British Golden Age Children’s Fiction in the Finnish Children’s Fantasy Literature of the 1950s.” University of Helsinki, Institute for Art Research, Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, 2001.

Schanoes, Veronica. “Queen Alice and the Monstrous Child: Alice through the Looking-Glass.” Children’s Literature. 45. (2017): 1-20.

Schiff, Stephen. “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense.” The New Yorker. (11.9.1992): 84-94.

Semenenko, Aleksei. “Semiotics of Nonsense and Non-sense: A Lotmanian Perspective.” Bakhtiniana 14.4 (2019): 152-62.

Sewell, Elizabeth, The Field of Nonsense. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952.

Shires, Linda M. “Fantasy, Nonsense, Parody, and the Status of the Real: The Example of Carroll.” Victorian Poetry 26.3 (1988): 267-83.

Shortsleeve, Kevin. “The Cat in the Hippie: Dr. Seuss, Nonsense, the Carnivalesque, and the Sixties Rebel.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Eds. Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011

_________________. “Edward Gorey, Children’s Literature, and Nonsense Verse.” in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, (27.1), Spring 2002, pp. 27-39.

_________________. “Edward Gorey: Nonsense, Surrealism, and Silent Matter.” Gorey’s Worlds. Ed.(?) Erin Monroe. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Princeton University Press. 2018. pp. 101-131. Looking at influences on Gorey’s work from nonsense and surrealist artists.

_________________. “Nonsense, Magic, Religion, and Superstition.” in Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature (53, 3): 2015 pp. 28-36. (Excerpt here)

_________________. The Politics of Nonsense: Civil Unrest, Otherness and National Mythology in Nonsense Literature. Unpub. D.Phil dissertation, Keble College, University of Oxford. 2007.

_________________. Unhappily Ever After: Edward Gorey and Children’s Literature. Unpub. M.A. thesis. University of Florida, 2002.

Simoniti, Barbara.”How to Make Nonsense: The Verbalizing Procedures of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 53.3 (2015): 66-71. Abstract.

Snider, Clifton. “Victorian Trickster: A Jungian Consideration of Edward Lear’s Nonsense Verse.” Psychological Perspectives 24 (1991). Web.

Sonstroem, David. “Making Earnest of Game: G. M. Hopkins and Nonsense Poetry.” Modern Language Quarterly. 2 (1967): 192–206.

Stewart, Susan, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: The John’s Hopkins UP, 1979.

Stow, Glenys. “Nonsense as Social Commentary in The Edible Woman.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes, vol. 23, no.3, 1988, pp. 90–101.

Strachey, Edward. “Nonsense as a Fine Art.” Quarterly Review. 167 (1888): 335-65. Web. This is perhaps the first great theoretical treatment of nonsense literature.

Sundmark, Björn. Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum. Lund: Lund University Press, 1999. 

_______________. (2010). Den bliga sången: svensk nonsenspoesi för barn. Lyrikvännen 4–5

_______________. (2012). Nonsens på svenska. Lyrikvännen 6.

Swaab, Peter. “Romantic Poetry and Victorian Nonsense Poetry: Some Directions of Travel.” Romanticism 25.1 (2019): 90-102.

____________. “Edward Lear’s Travels in Nonsense and Europe.” Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent. Ed. Lee, Louise. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 75-105.

____________.  “‘The Light of Sense / Goes Out’: Romantic Poetry and Victorian Nonsense Poetry.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 60-80.

Swifty, Tom. Perplexicon: Your Pea-Green Guide to Nonsense Literature. Rotterdam: Brave New Books, 2016. An earlier edition was published in 2015 as A Course in Nonsense.

Tarnogórska, Maria.”‘Funny’ and ‘Curious’ Verse: The Limerick in Polish Children’s Literature.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 53.3 (2015): 37-45. Abstract.

Taylor, A. L. The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Edinburgh, London: Oliver & Boyd, 1952.

Thomas, Donald. Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background. London: John Murray, 1996.

Tigges, Wim, An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988.

_________. “Edward Lear’s Limericks and the Aesthetics of Nonsense,” Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, XVII-XVIII. 34-35. (2013) 119-138.

_________. ed., Explorations in the Field of Nonsense. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987.

_________. “The Limerick: The Sonnet of Nonsense?”Dutch Quarterly Review, 16 (1986): 220-236.

_________.  “Nonsense in the Netherlands.” in Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 53.3 (2015): 9-19. Excerpt here.

_________. “Prosody as Field of Play: A Neglected Issue in the Translation of Nonsense Verse.” Jeux de mots – enjeux littéraires, de François Rabelais à Richard Millet: Essais en hommage à Sjef Houppermans. Eds. Nordholt, Annelies Schulte and Paul J. Smith. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 220-.

Tulloch, Bonnie. Master’s thesis, A spoonful of silly : examining the relationship between children’s nonsense verse and critical literacy. Simon Fraser University, 2013, unpublished. This thesis looks at Seuss, Silverstein, Dennis Lee, and JonArno Lawson in terms of how their nonsense reminds “children that childhood is essentially an adult concept—a subjective interpretation (i.e., translation) of their lived experiences.” The result is a “potential relationship between nonsense verse and critical literacy.” Web.

Uglow, Jenny. Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. London: Faber, 2017.

____________. “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat: Edward Lear in the Villa Emily, San Remo.” Lives of Houses. Eds. Kennedy, Kate and Hermione Lee. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020. 95-108.

van Leeuwen, Hendrik, “The Liaison of Visual and Written Nonsense,” Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, ed. Wim Tigges (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), pp. 61–95.

Vigeurs, Susan T. “Nonsense and the Language of Poetry.” Signal, no. 42, Sept. 1983, pp. 137.49.

Wells, Carolyn, “The Sense of Nonsense,” Scribner’s Magazine, 29 (1901): 239-48.

West, Mark. “Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense: A Scroobious Classic,” in Perry Nodelman, ed. Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children’s Literature (II, 150-56). West Lafayette, Ind.: Children’s Literature Association Publications, 1987.

Westwood, Cassie. “Humans, and Other Nonsense Animals.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 281-299.

White, Donna R. “Nonsense Elements in Jane Austen’s Juvenilia.” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line 39.1 (2018).

White, Laura Mooneyham. “Domestic Queen, Queenly Domestic: Queenly Contradictions in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 32.2 (2007): 110-28.

Williams, James. “Lewis Carroll and the Private Life of Words.” The Review of English Studies. 64.266 (2012): 651-671.

______________. “‘Word Beyond Speech’: Nonsense and the Sacred.” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense, eds. Anna Barton and James Williams. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 311-324.

Williams, James and Matthew Bevis. eds. Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Willis, Gary, “Two Different Kettles of Talking Fish: The Nonsense of Lear and Carroll,” Jabberwocky, 9 (1980): 87-94.

Wong, Mou-Lan. “The Congruity of Incongruity: Victorian Intermedial Humour.” Humour in the Arts: New Perspectives. Eds. Westbrook, Vivienne and Shun-liang Chao. New York – Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. 167-93.

“Word-Twisting versus Nonsense.” The Spectator, no. 3067 (9 April, 1887): 491-2. Web.

Wullschläger, Jackie, Inventing Wonderland, The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne. London: Methuen, 1995.

 

Yarbrough, Wynn. “Playing It Real: Nonsense Poetics, Identity, and African American Poetry for Children and Young Adults.” in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Summer 2021. 6:42. pp. 178-200.

 

The summer 2020 issue of Victorian Poetry (Volume 58, Number 2), edited by Jasmine Jaegger and Benjamin Westwood, is entirely devoted to Edward Lear. Here is the table of contents:

Introduction: New Work on Edward Lear, Jasmine Jagger, Benjamin Westwood,
pp. 107-119.

“One of the Dumms”: Lear, Deafness, and the Wound of Sound, Sara Lodge, pp. 121-133.

“Antic Dispositions”: Lear and Dickens, Eliza Haughton-Shaw, pp. 135-149.

The Old Person of Chroma, James Williams, pp. 151-167.

“Provocative propinquity”: Paul Muldoon and Edward Lear, Alex Alonso,
pp. 169-185.

Edward Lear’s Happiness, Matthew Bevis, pp. 187-205.

Lear’s Leftovers, Noreen Masud, pp. 207-220.

Afterword: Lear Outside Time, Jenny Uglow, pp. 221-233.