Here are online sources dedicated to the analysis of nonsense, formal and informal

Most of the top scholarship on nonsense is not easily accessible online, but I’m trying to gather as much as possible here. See the secondary bibliography for a full list of sources, most of which are accessible through JSTOR, WorldCat, or other content distributors. Through your local or school library, you often have access to these services–just ask your librarian! Below, you will find some more “academic” studies (like PhD theses, essays from journals), and some more “popular” ones (like newspaper articles). Be aware!

General sites and analyses

Literary Nonsense on Wikipedia (where the verbiage might look familiar!) ☞ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_nonsense

An interesting mix of scholarly approaches. But who are these people? Well, here’s the blog… you be the judge!  ☞https://literatureandnonsense.wordpress.com.

Holbrook Jackson’s “Masters of Nonsense” (go to page 30 in link), in All manner of folk; interpretations and studies (1921). This discusses the work of Lear and Carroll. Jackson was the editor of a Complete Edward Lear edition that was standard for a long while, until Vivien Noakes came to town.

G.K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Nonsense” in A Defence of Nonsense, and other essays (1911). On Lear and Carroll. This is one of the classic early analyses of nonsense. Chesterton takes the angle of nonsense as an expression of spirituality.

Hana F. Khasawneh, The Dynamics of Nonsense Literature: 1846-1940. Unpublished PhD thesis. The University of Sussex. 2008. An ambitious thesis tackling Victorian nonsense, the avant-garde, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien.

[Strachey, Sir Edward], “Nonsense as a Fine Art,” Quarterly Review, 167 (October, 1888): 335-65. Online.

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: examining the relationship between children’s nonsense verse and critical literacy”(Simon Fraser University, 2013, unpublished) looks at Seuss, Silverstein, Dennis Lee, and JonArno Lawson in terms of how their nonsense reminds “children that childhood is essentially an adult concept—a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

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

“Nonsense Pure And Simple” The Spectator. Nov. 3, 1888. 1503-1504.  Online. 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.

Anthony Burgess, author of A Long Trip to Teatime, a nonsense novel (in addition to A Clockwork Orange and many others, of course), writes this piece, called “Sense and Nonsense,” for the New York Times, on nonsense literature in general, from old to new. His understanding of its nature and history is a bit wobbly (sometimes a lot wobbly), and he’s a bit offensive at times, but still, there’s something to his take on it.

Edward Lear

Bevis, Matthew. “Aspects of Edward Lear,” Part I, Part 2, Part III, Part IV

______________. 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.

_____________. “Knowing Edward Lear.” This is a website devoted to the project that will become Bevis’s book. It has links to quite a few resources on Lear.

Historical analyses on Edward Lear and Literary Nonsense can be found on Marco Graziosi’s site, here.

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.

• 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.

• Matthew Bevis posts occasionally on their blog about their Lear collection. “Aspects of Edward Lear,” Part I, Part 2, Part III, Part IV

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

Marco Graziosi’s Most Noble Nonsense Site, dedicated to Edward Lear and more, http://www.nonsenselit.org and also  A Blog of Bosh. Marco has been doing this for a long while and has impressive resources.

_______________, “The Limerick” on Edward Lear Home Page.

Michael Heyman. “Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear’s Literary Nonsense in Context.” University of Glasgow, Faculty of Arts, Department of English Literature, 1999. On parody, illustration, and nonsense as manifestation of the Romantic concept of the child.

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

Jagger, Jasmine. Jagger is working on the relationship between Lear and the Tennysons. Here is the website, and there will be a volume of edited letters in the near future.

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

George Orwell Orwell essay “Nonsense Poetry” focuses on Edward Lear and argues for the impossibility of trying to write the stuff. “Nonsense Poetry” Tribune. London. December 21, 1945.

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

Peter Swaab, “Edward Lear: Genius in a World of Nonsense” (2012), an article in The Telegraph on Lear’s bicentenerary.

Jackie Wullschlager, “Edward Lear” a quick piece on Edward Lear basics.

Lewis Carroll

Here is a good start if you’re looking into Carroll, at the Poetry Foundation.

Leonard Marcus, lecture at the Library of Congress, “Lewis Carroll in the Mirror of Surrealism” (2016). This is wide-ranging and good as general introduction to Carroll. Marcus touches on Romanticism, the evolving concept of the child, and of course Carroll and his influence on surrealist art. (Lecture starts around 9:30).

This is site devoted entirely to the 150th Anniversary of Alice, with various resources.

The British Library celebrated the 150th anniversary with this exhibition (and article, by Helen Melody (2015).

Another British Library article on the 150th anniversary, this by Will Brooker (2015).

Michael Heyman’s lecture (video, 2015) at the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, San Diego State University, on the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. David Hasselhoff and Suzanne Somers appear in this–but you’ll never guess how.

Can we finally put to rest the myths about Dodgson? Here is a Smithsonian article (2010) that helps.

Making sense of nonsense is a dangerous business, but sometimes it may be possible, as in this nifty comparison of Alice and Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, by Maryn Brown, “Making Sense of Nonsense: An Examination of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth as Allegories of Children’s Learning” (2005).

Frank Key

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

Edward Gorey

John Lennon

An excerpt from Philip Norman’s  John Lennon: The Life. (HarperCollins, 2009).

An in-depth interview (1968) with Lennon, with a focus on the origin and nature of his nonsense, his songwriting, and the connections between it all.

Mervyn Peake

Edmund Milly (2013) “Nonsense and Trauma in the Works of Mervyn Peake” a Master’s research paper. 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.

Peake has a website, here, which exhibits his wide-ranging genius, in novels, plays, poems, and art.  Here is the link to a timeline of his life, with photos and drawings.

Anushka Ravishankar

Michael Heyman, “Anushka Ravishankar’s Indian Nonsense” in Horn Book Magazine, (Nov/Dec. 2006), a piece on one of the few current nonsense writers and rock star badminton players in India. Things have changed some since then, with more writers surfacing. Ravishankar has also published many books since then.

Saritha Rao Rayachoti, “This ‘Indian Dr. Seuss’ Is Very Fond of Nonsense,” Atlas Obscure (web), June 14, 2017

Laura E. Richards (and Margaret Atwood)

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

Carl Sandburg

Alan Watts

☞This is a lecture on nothing less than meaning and life, given by one of the great Zen/Buddhist philosophers of the 20th century. Nonsense, in a way, is the answer.

Zippy the Pinhead

I suppose this would have to be considered “primary,” but it is a surprisingly earnest attempt (for Griffith) to educated the masses, who are looking for the “joke,” on how this comic is different.  In the following series of six strips, Zippy and Griffy explain how the comic functions,  and though it doesn’t recognize itself as the nonsense genre, much of the mechanics are similar. Click here for the main page, with all six “tutorial” strips, and click your way through them. Lesson Three, in particular, is useful in terms of understanding how Griffith’s “nonsense” works.

Translation

Michael Heyman’s☞“The Perils and Nonpereils of Literary Nonsense Translation,” Words Without Borders, 2014.

A blog post by the enigmatic “lprothwell1,” on Sukumar Ray and Sampurna Chattarji’s translations. Why don’t they post their names on this blog? Secret nonsense society, eh?

Nonsense in India

An analysis of the illustrations of the great Bengali nonsense writer, Sukumar Ray, by Poushali Bhadury. “Fantastic Beasts and How to Sketch Them: The Fabulous Bestiary of Sukumar Ray.” in South Asian Review. 34:1 (2013) 11-38. Online.

In this essay, “Postcolonial Responses to the Western Superhero: A Study though Indian Nonsense Literature” (2015), Anurima Chanda takes on nonsense in India, by way of nonsense superheroes created by Samit Basu

Urmishree Bedamatta’s essay argues that nonsense is not only a tool for literacy, but a bridge between languages in multilingual classrooms in India. This is dense reading, it might warm your literary waddles. “Playing with Nonsense: Toward Language Bridging in a Multilingual Classroom” (Children’s Literature in English Language Education, 1: May, 2013).

Along with This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (ed. Michael Heyman) appeared this wee interview, which briefly discusses nonsense in India and the workings of the volume. It’s in a Scholastic blog, from 2012.

A comparison of translations of Sukumar Ray’s nonsense, by Atanu Bera.

Nonsense and Modernism

Eric John Rettberg. Ridiculous Modernism: Nonsense and the New in Literature Since 1900. PhD dissertation, Dartmouth College.  Elk Grove Village, Illinois, 2003. Web.

Nonsense in Pedagogy

This study focuses on the use of nonsense language in Second Language educational settings in order to introduce phonology and phonetics at the earliest stage of English language acquisition to encourage correct pronunciation in young L2 learners of English. The materials chosen for the study are selected verses from Edward Lear’s nonsense ABC. The nonsense ABC is introduced as a teaching/learning tool to help young primary school children in Sweden develop their pronunciation skills and avoid fossilized language patterns at a later stage of Second Language Acquisition.

Nonsense and Dada

A BBC talk on Dada and nonsense. It’s an amateur talk, which doesn’t try to distinguish nonsense from dada, but overall it’s entertaining! From 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000k9ws