found: Tigges, W. An anatomy of literary nonsense, 1988:Ch. 2 (the most essential characteristic of the genre of nonsense is that it presents an unresolved tension, a balance between presence and absence of meaning; literary nonsense is characterized by four essential elements: an unresolved tension between presence and absence of meaning, lack of emotional involvement, playlike presentation, and an emphasis, stronger than in any other type of literature, upon its verbal nature) Ch. 3 ("What nonsense is not": nonsense differentiated from humor, nursery rhymes, light verse, surrealism, Dada, absurdism, metafiction) Ch. 4 (Examples of nonsense fiction: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass; Anthony Burgess's A Long Trip to Teatime; Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman)
found: Oxford encyclopedia of children's literature (via Oxford reference online), Nov. 2, 2012:(nonsense: nonsense writing comes in two forms: the kind of silly explorations of sound and sense often generated by young children, and the much more complex body of work that can be called literary nonsense, best known through Victorian writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll; the two kinds of nonsense share some characteristics: both are ludic and delight in wordplay and rhythm, but whereas nonsense by children is largely spontaneous, fugitive, and essentially meaningless, literary nonsense has a distinguished intellectual tradition)
