Angela Carter 19401992 The Bloody Chamber 1979

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Angela Carter 1940-1992 The Bloody Chamber
(1979)
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(No Transcript)
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 Novels Shadow Dance, 1966. The Magic
Toyshop, 1967. Several Perceptions, 1968.
Heroes and Villains, 1969. Love, 1971. The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972.
The Passions of New Eve, 1977. Nights at the
Circus, 1984. Wise Children, 1991.
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Collections of stories Fireworks Nine Profane
Pieces (1974) The Bloody Chamber (1979) Black
Venus (1985) aka Saints and Strangers American
Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993) Burning Your
Boats The Collected Short Stories (1995)
Non-fiction (only some are listed here) The
Sadeian Woman An Exercise in Cultural History
(1979) (US title The Sadeian Woman and the
Ideology of Pornography)Nothing Sacred Selected
Writings (1982) Expletives Deleted Selected
Writings (1992) Translation The Fairy Tales of
Charles Perrault (1977) Sleeping Beauty and
Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982)
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Angela Carter was, without question, a
20th-century original. No matter what one thinks
of her writing, no one can argue that she was
ever less than unique. Magic Realism, Surrealism,
Fantasy, Science Fiction, Gothic, Feminism,
Postmodernism all of these categories apply,
and yet all are one-dimensional in their
application to Carter none of them, with the
possible exception of Surrealism, encompass the
full spectrum of her accomplishments.
Jeff VanderMeer http//themodernword.com/s
criptorium/carter.html
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• Surrealism is better known and easier to define
  in the visual arts than in literature. Leonora
  Carrington is a rare example of a Surrealist
  equally committed to visual and verbal art
  forms. Her work is now perceived as pioneering a
  good deal of postmodernist experimentation,
  especially by women artists and writers such as
  Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson, who use
  surrealist effects to subvert patriarchal
  cultural assumptions.
• Surrealism is not quite the same as magic
  realism In surrealism, metaphors become the
  real, effacing the world of reason and common
  sense. The Surrealists favourite analogy for
  their art, and often its source, was dreaming, in
  which, as Freud demonstrated, the unconscious
  reveals its secret desires and fears in vivid
  images and surprising narrative sequences
  unconstrained by the logic of our waking lives.
• David Lodge, The Art of
  Fiction, 1992

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Leonora Carrington (1917)

• The Recital of Dreams
• Modern Art Museum of Mexico City

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But this resemblance to dreams is deliberate,
conscious as it were. I have studied dreams
extensively and I know about their structure and
symbolism. I think dreams are a way of the mind
telling itself stories. I use free association
and dream imagery when I write. I like to think I
have a hot line to my subconscious. I am
interested in the way people make sense, or try
to make sense, of their experience and mythology
is part of that, after all. Im a Freudian, in
that sense, and some others, too. But I see my
business, the nature of my work, as taking apart
mythologies, in order to find out what basic,
human stuff they are made of in the first
place. Angela Carter interviewed by Rosemary
Carroll http//www.bombsite.com/issues/17/article
s/821
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Some critics have seen Carter as a follower of
magic realism yet she is, even more, the natural
heiress of a northern Gothic tradition. Her
stories look back to the baroque fantasies of
Irish and British writers like Lord Dunsany,
Arthur Machen and Walter de la Mare -- and beyond
them to Thomas De Quincey's ''Confessions of an
English Opium Eater.'' The 20th-century writer
Angela Carter most resembles, however, is the
Danish author Isak Dinesen, whose ''Seven Gothic
Tales'' features a similar mixture of bizarre,
haunted northern scenes and bejeweled prose.
There is even a physical resemblance. Carter's
ancestors came from northeast Scotland and
Yorkshire, where many Norsemen settled, and, like
Dinesen, she was pale and elegant -- a bold,
adventurous Scandinavian beauty. There is a lot
of drama in Carter's stories, and many
passionate, often perverse relationships. In her
stories, women turn into wolves, incest and
murder are committed, the dead walk and people
pass through mirrors into other worlds.
Winter's Tales By ALISON LURIE. The New York
Times, May 19, 1996 http//www.nytimes.com/books/
98/12/27/specials/carter-boats.html
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This is an aside on Tue Oct 6 2009 Hilary Mantel
was named the winner of the 50,000 Man Booker
Prize for Fiction for Wolf Hall, published by
Fourth Estate. Although the title sounds like
it could be a neo-Gothic work, in fact it is a
work of historical fiction. Wolf Hall has been
the bookies' favourite since the longlist was
announced in July 2009. Wolf Hall by Hilary
Mantel was picked from a shortlist of six titles.
A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee,  Adam Foulds, Simon
Mawer and Sarah Waters were all shortlisted for
this year's prize. Wolf Hall is set in the 1520s
and tells the story of Thomas Cromwell's rise to
prominence in the Tudor court. 
http//www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1291
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"Gothic" here implies the European tradition
that goes back to (at least) the eighteenth
century (one of Carters books is a polemical
rereading of the Marquis de Sade) and is a
category that overlaps with other
subgenres--romance, pornography, detective
fiction, science fiction. To say "We live in
Gothic times" is to suggest that the subgenres
are now the appropriate and (paradoxically)
central ones http//www.bookrags.com/biography/an
gela-olive-carter-dlb/ Gothic a sense of
impending doom, premonition of evil, suspense,
confusion of identities, use of doubles, incest
motif, death, terror reader is encouraged to
identify with protagonist Last night I dreamt
I went to Manderley again Daphne du
Maurier, Rebecca (1938) (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
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Angela Carter's life the background of social
mobility, the teenage anorexia, the education and
self-education, the early marriage and divorce,
the role-playing and shape-shifting, the travels,
the choice of a man much younger, the baby in her
forties is the story of someone walking a
tightrope. It's all happening "on the edge," in
no man's land, among the debris of past
convictions. By the end, her life fitted her more
or less like a glove, but that's because she'd
put it together by trial and error, bricolage,
all in the (conventionally) wrong order. Her
genius and estrangement came out of a
thin-skinned extremity of response to the
circumstances of her life and to the signs of the
times. Lorna Sage, "Death of the Author",
Granta, No. 41, Autumn 1992, p. 236. N.B. Lorna
Sage also edited Flesh and the Mirror Essays on
the Art of Angela Carter (1994)