From the scholarly article ‘Nonsense, Magic, Religion, and Superstition’ by Kevin Shortsleeve in Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, Vol 53 Iss 3, 2015. He’s referring to nonsense as a literary mode such as in the writing of Lewis Carroll, along with many traditional folk tales and nursery rhymes.

While nonsense […] often enough has its feet planted firmly on the ground - manifesting an overt mistrust of all that is spiritual, magical, or divine - a deeper look reveals that nonsense has been consciously or unconsciously cribbing from occult traditions for ages and, more specifically, that in the impossible spaces that nonsense occupies and promotes, there are profound echoes of an intimate ancestral connection to the spiritual and supernatural.