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I started making comparisons between Alice in Wonderland and Watership Down to see what sorts of literary elements they shared in common, and I found that they both contained:
- Extensive lists of characters.
- Intense background for those characters.
- A detached narrator who is not part of the story.
- Themes of weak protagonist overcoming strong protagonists.
- Frame stories containing lore and mythology giving extra background for the reader.
- The feel of a children's story with the potential be read with deeper meaning.
As I looked at each of these elements, I realized that there was far more in common between the two authors and their stories that I originally thought. If there are this many similarities, what other things could I find? This led me to want to compare the lives of the authors themselves from a biographical approach. Here is the paper shell it has led me to so far.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzDQGRx5zRlkMDB2QUVvV2drUTQ/edit
Great! I'm always a fan of making lists of similarities and differences. I think having such a list visually in front of me helps me brainstorm. (That's what I'm doing in my own "Paper Shell" post... *ahem hem*...)
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