Angela Carter and Western Philosophy

Although she had no formal training in the discipline, Angela Carter was an avid reader of philosophy, as anyone who has dipped into her papers in the British Library can attest. For Carter, fiction and philosophy were inseparable. In the Omnibus documentary made just before her death, she declared, “I do think literature should be asking the great, unanswerable, adolescent questions. Why are we set upon this planet? For what purpose?” Even in her earliest fictions, she claims to have always been grappling with the big questions about being and the nature of knowledge. Such “unanswerable questions,” she added, “obsess me and perplex me, and I do think we can find our way amongst them towards some sort of reason.” Although Aiden Day’s early study, Angela Carter: the Rational Glass (1998), read her work as a feminist re-visioning of Enlightenment, for the most part, critics have discussed the philosophical subtexts to her work only in passing

Enlightenment · Epistemology · Scottish Enlightenment · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · History · Philosophy