Re-Visiting Angela Carter

It is said that, following the death of Angela Carter, in 1992–3 more postgraduate students applied for funding to support research on her work than on the whole of the eighteenth-century. However, it is not known how many of those applications were successful. The number of books published on eighteenth-century writers since then (lots), compared with those on Carter (less than a dozen), suggests that the success rate may not have been high. Although now acknowledged as one of the most important writers of her period, there are still surprisingly few critical books devoted entirely to Carter. This situation alone makes the publication of Rebecca Munford's Re-Visiting Angela Carter significant, although the essays gathered together here also constitute a valuable contribution to Carter scholarship in their own right. This collection examines the plethora of literary and cultural allusions that shape Carter's work. As Jacqueline Pearson points out in her foreword, “From Shakespeare to Sade, from Baudelaire to the Brothers Grimm, from Proust to Poe, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Le Douanier Rousseau, from John Ford the seventeenth-century dramatist to John Ford the film-director, all is grist to her mill” (viii). Some of these influences have been spotted by other critics but the essays in this volume are distinguished by an illuminating focus on the relationship between intertextuality and the politics of gender. As Pearson states, Carter's engagement with literary predecessors forms a key part of her demythologizing project. Likewise, Munford presents Carter's penchant for quotation, appropriation, and revision of canonical texts and male-dominated literary, philosophical, and artistic movements as a feminist strategy, a means of interrogating and subverting patriarchal authority, rather than simply a postmodern feature of her work

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Art history · Intertextuality · Literature · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy