The language of Lewis Carroll: fantasy or fact?

The author intends to show in this paper that Lewis Carroll's use of language reflects agreement with some assumptions underlying the Romantic theory of language and with other assumptions implicit in the Utilitarian theory of language. In creating his fantasy worlds, Lewis Carroll used language to explore the limits of these assumptions, and he thereby arrived at his own conclusions about its potential for representing both fantasy and fact. The author intends to delineate the linguistic relations between fantasy and fact as they occur throughout his fiction, demonstrating which assumptions from each school are embraced and which are rejected by Lewis Carroll.