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Angela Carter
\"This second edition reviews Carter's novels in the light of recent critical developments and offers entirely new perspectives on her work. There are now extended single chapters on Carter's most widely-studied novels, including The Passion of New Eve and Nights at the Circus, and discussion of the long essay \"The Sadeian Woman.\"\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers
Now available in paperback, Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers interrogates the vexed question of Angela Carter’s feminist politics through the dusty lens of European Gothic. It illuminates her ambivalent relation to some of her most contentious European literary forebears, reveals her rich knowledge of French literature and offers fresh insights into her literary practices afforded by newly available archival material. This book analyses Carter’s textual engagements with a dirty lineage of European Gothic that can be mapped from the Marquis de Sade’s obsession with desecration and defilement, through Baudelaire’s perverse decompositions of the muse and decadent imaginings of infernal femininity, to surrealism’s violent dreams of abjection. It argues that Carter’s most troublesome engagements with her European Gothic forefathers are unexpectedly those which are most vital to a consideration of her feminist politics.
eBook
Resistance and Complicity: Gender Politics in Angela Carter’s “The Erl-King”
This article looks at two interrelated reading approaches to Angela Carter’s short story “The Erl-King” (1979) by way of locating Carter’s questioning of pervasive gender norms and biases. While the model of female complicity she seems to adopt fosters patriarchal ideologies, the model of resistance she also follows enhances anti-patriarchal feminist ones. Hence, this ambivalence can be interpreted in terms of Carter’s understanding of desire as well as a specific form of unconventional, “postmodern feminism” that negotiates sex/gender distinctions yet favors revised power structures and ambivalent zones of contestation. Between patriarchy and feminism, that is, between complicity and resistance, we have (wo)man in a natural state preceding prejudiced ideological constructions and discursive formations. Hence, Carter’s fiction presents alternative visions on gender relations, more plausible (even if framed in fairy-tale structures) and less radical than often thought. In her ambivalent world, female sexuality becomes a site of confinement yet liberation. Carter did not simply write feminist revisions or deconstructions of traditional (patriarchal) tales (i.e., the resistance model). Indeed, her heroines seem to initially invite or acquiesce in their sexual victimization or exploitation (i.e., the complicity model). Carter tried to strike a balance between realism and magic realism, between the real and the ideal, and between the defiant and the complicit. Her stories are not simply “anti-patriarchal” or “feminist” as they blur gender roles, subvert power relations, and offer unorthodox “postmodern feminist” poetics. In Carter’s ambivalent poetics, as this story illustrates, complicity is made a precondition for subversion, yet substituting one repressive ideology with another is a pitfall Carter resisted in her careful revision of the fairy-tale genre.
Journal Article
Ritchie and Carter’s beauties and beasts
Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Angela Carter both recreated the classic tale Beauty and the Beast. This article analyses these recreated tales using the new historicist and feminist theories. The analysis allows for a discussion of how each tale conforms to and/or contrasts with expected gender roles. Thackeray and Carter reflect particular ideas about gender within their tales. Writing in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, the women published within particularly patriarchal social contexts – Ritchie slightly more so than Carter. The limiting social contexts allowed for minimal, if any, diversion from the status quo of expected gender behaviours. These social contexts impacted on the writers of these centuries and their texts. However, writers such as Thackeray and Carter did not simply accept the patriarchal expectations thrust upon men and women but actively commented against them within their tales. These women writers developed tales that were commentaries on the gender expectations of their social contexts. Although both of these centuries were saturated with patriarchal ideas encouraging particular rigid behaviours for men and women, Thackeray and Carter sought to recreate these limiting gender expectations through publishing dynamic tales. Each writer includes characters and relationships in their tales, which are alternatives to their societies’ patriarchal expectations of men and women. By creating new narratives into their Beauty and the Beast tales, these women writers both question and critique patriarchal rule and provide alternatives to it.
Journal Article
The invention of Angela Carter : a biography
\"With unprecedented access to its subject's personal records and informed by fresh, unvarnished anecdotes from family, friends, and colleagues, Edmund Gordon's biography provides the first full account of Angela Carter's amazing life and enduring work\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
“The Very Highest Level of Mythic Resonance.” Angela Carter and the Trope of Recognition
This essay aims at adding to the critical debate on Angela Carter and myths from a more technical perspective and discusses her keen interest in the “lo and behold” moment of recognition. I claim that for Carter myths “work” in literary texts by producing a sudden illumination. At that moment, an image reveals itself to be interposed from an older story that has, or used to have, some cultural importance. In order to describe this phenomenon, I am going to refer to Aristotle’s definition of recognition in his Poetics and essays of C.G. Jung, for whom myths are instances of revelation. To prove that Carter was very much interested in the technicalities of recognition, I analyse her non-fiction devoted to Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Brontë. Carter’s sample mythic reading of Jane Eyre (1847) and her plans to re-write the last chapter of this novel provide me with enough material to risk a hypothesis regarding how, in her opinion, myths might intertextually enrich the reading experience.
Journal Article
The pleasure of the feminist text : reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter
\"I would regard myself as a feminist writer, because I'm a feminist in everything else and one can't compartmentalise these things in one's life.\" (Angela Carter) \"When I became a feminist in 1968, I felt that I'd come home: the first home I ever had that was feminine. And it was very wild and theatrical and erotic, the early feminism.\" (Michèle Roberts) Angela Carter and Michèle Roberts share a keen interest in gender and sexual identity, but many of their topics seem to mark them as opposites: Roberts's fascination with the impact of religion, motherhood and autobiography on female identity covers areas that Carter shuns in her writings. In reading these two authors parallel and in contrast to each other, this monograph follows a triple objective: it provides a comprehensive critical introduction to the works of Roberts, explores aspects of Carter's work that have not yet been analyzed sufficiently (religion, motherhood, and masculinity), and uses both authors to explore motifs and strategies of feminist writing. The analyses of both authors' works are supplemented by close readings of a wide range of theoretical perspectives (especially French feminism and psychoanalysis) and concise theoretical outlines of the topics covered (radical feminism, religion, motherhood and fatherhood, masculinity, fairy tales, romances and chick lit, and history and auto/biography).
eBook
Rousseau in a Post-Apocalyptic Context: Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains and Science Fiction
The present paper discusses Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969), which parodies both “post-apocalyptic” novels in the Cold War era and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory on civilisation. By analysing this novel in comparison, not only to Rousseau’s On the Origin of Inequality (1755), but also to the works of various science fiction writers in the 1950s and 1960s, the paper aims to examine Carter’s reinterpretation of Rousseau in a post-apocalyptic context. As I will argue, Heroes and Villains criticises Rousseau from a feminist point of view to not only represent the dystopian society as full of inequality and violence, but also to show that human beings, having forgotten the nuclear war as their great “sin” in the past, can no longer create a bright future. Observing the underlying motifs in the novel, the paper will reveal how Carter attempts to portray a world where human history has totally ended, or where people cannot make “history” in spite of the fact that they biologically survived the holocaust. From this perspective, I will clarify the way in which Carter reinterprets Rousseau’s notion of “fallen” civilisation in the new context as a critique of the nuclear issues in the late twentieth century.
Journal Article