Lose your sense of reason and liberate your mind. Lewis Carroll's short poem challenges everything we know about language, words and the way we transmit information. Subversive as far as language is concerned his mock-heroic ballad with its portmanteau words is also a thought-provoking experiment in the use of certain tropes. Informative as to what actually constitutes a heroic ballad (its rhythm or its words?) Jabberwocky also becomes a brain-twisting trip into the realms of logic.

In Lewis Carroll's famous mind-stretching, logic-twisting heroic ballad language subverts logic, words are compounded and the validity of thought itself comes under question, if not attack. And yet the poem has endured as both a symbol of surrealist ideals and Freudian thought and a whimsical piece of entertainment that has a knack of getting under children's skin and staying in their minds. Adult readers have spent years analysing its tropes, studying the way Carroll uses the internal rhythm of language to create a certain feel, an impression that has nothing to do with the words of the poem itself. In our time it has become indicative of memes and how they work, as well as a favourite of the PDA generation who, caught up in the Looking Glass world of meetings, directives, productivity targets and a 24/7 world, find mental haven in the subversive imagery of Lewis Carroll's topsy-turvy world.