ABSTRACT. Why is a raven like a writing desk? This puzzling question was first introduced by Lewis Carroll in his first Alice book and has piqued the minds of a great many number of readers and thinkers. Yet the author himself acknowledged in a later commentary that the riddle was originally invented not to have an answer at all. The frustrating search for an insinuated but ever elusive meaning also characterizes the literature of nonsense. Yet, despite never fulfilling the reader’s expectations for coherence and logical resolution, nonsense arouses interest due to its ability to make powerful intuitions about the nature of meaning and meaning-production, the arbitrariness of rules and the limitations of human intellect. The current paper explores precisely this inclination of nonsense toward intuiting. pp. 39-47

Keywords: literary nonsense, intuition, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Victorian literature