Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a children’s work about a bored little girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a gorgeous wonderland filled with unique and weird creatures and events。 All of a sudden, Alice wakes up on her sister’s lap and she realizes that is a dream。 The freakish plot makes wide and lasting popular in all ranges of the age, especially in the kids。 It is regarded to be one of the best and typical of the children’s literature。 Its vivid narration, strange characters and fantastic imagination exert a deep influence on both art and literature。

There’s no doubt that an exact definition in a single sentence is impossible, but that impossibility might only mean that our definition of definition is too stringent。 “The word “romantic” came into common usage in English in the 18th century, by which time the connotations of the medieval romance had expanded to encompass a wide-ranging taste for the picturesque and the fanciful: the cult of sensibility (or sentiment) of the mid-18th century” (Heath 4)。 Romanticism was more self-consciously and assertively a movement, and it spread more widely and deeply throughout Europe。 The emerging Romantic spirit of 18th century England was shown by some as a revival of Elizabethan literature and its “Gothic” tendencies。 English Romanticism has been described as a “renaissance of the Renaissance” (Heath 4)。 Characteristics of romanticism, though hard, can still be defined generally。 Romanticism paid attention to subjectivity, inspiration, intuition, imagination。 (Shang 3) It emphasized the love for nature and yearned for the natural, primitive and uncivilized life。 

2。 Literature Review

Lewis Carroll and his famous work have attracted wide concern in the literary world。 The unusual plots and funny dialogues in the book attract innumerable readers around the world。 Almost a century after its first appearance in print, this novel still remains one of the most beloved and popular children’ s fiction。 

In recent years, a growing number of Chinese and western scholars have researched this novel。 Aila Malkki holds that the richness of the emotional subtext and the problems of conveying it in translation from the point of view of the four Finnish translations by contrasting examples from them with the original text, as well as with each other。 文献综述

Compared with western experts, Chinese scholars interpret the novel from different angles。 Some scholars approach the novel from the perspective of functional equivalence。 They discuss the translation of this novel from the Nida’s functional equivalence。 Chen Yueming claims, “functional equivalence theory provides theoretical guidance for the translation children’s literature”。 Another critic means that the good children’s literature translation should not only be aware of the receptor, but also follow the principle of child-orientation。 Another critic, Tong Mu makes a thorough analysis of Zhao Yuanren’s translation of this novel according to the functional equivalence。

Other critics read the novel from the linguistic angle。 For instance, Li Xia, she observes that Alice in Wonderland is about Alice’s growth from the perspective of appraisal theory and analyzes the self-identification of children’s growing-up。 Zhou Hua researches the first Chinese translation of this book from the perspective of literary stylistic。 His discussion focuses on the stylistic features from the original to the translation。 He thinks that Zhao Yuanren’s version can be regarded as a successful translation。 Gu Nina, concentrates on the Zhao’s version from the angle of semiotic and thinks that his version is taken as the best one。

So far, a lot of researchers have studied this book and tried to apply various theories to this novel。 However, few researches have been made from the angle of romanticism。 Some critics simply observe that Alice is a romantic girl who prefers imagination to dream world。 Based on the above, this paper dedicates fully and completely to analyzing the romanticism of this book in terms of the praise of nature, the embodiment of imagination and the concern for real world。 Therefore, this thesis aims at exploring the romantic features through a careful study of the content and plot so as to add a case study to the present research。