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The contemporary world is so dependent on the virtual, with its constantly morphing and invisibly magical potentialities, that it is somewhat paradoxical that the speculative, explorative aspect of architectural drawing is so undervalued in this context. The profession's computerised quick‐fix, feed‐me, satisfy‐me normative mentality has limited truck with the intangible. Peter J Baldwin writes an ode to the phantasmagorical and the ephemeral, citing it as a useful tool to enhance and liberate the creative design mind. Allied with tactics of re‐reading and post‐rationalisation, he constructs a spectral 'machine' for making work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 20th and early 21st century, European circus has become embroiled in public debates about the inclusion of live animal acts, some of which have recently been replaced with hologram alternatives. I ask what such replacements of live bodies with technically mediated one's does to the sense of risk and sensation which has always defined live circus acts and their claim to authenticity through the threat of live danger. I investigate recent revaluations (Schulze, Funk, and Vermeulen) in Theatre Studies of the concept of authenticity after postmodernism to reflect on how the complex mix of loss, assertion, and compensation in these debates can be deployed in analyzing two distinct narrative representations of the circus (Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus); the first exemplifies classic realism, the second a version of postmodernism. I ask how the texts negotiate and interrogate the ongoing problem of circus’s relationship to authenticity, where authenticity is at once an impossible imperative against which circus strives to measure itself, a condition and guarantee of its danger and immediacy, and a performative promise which disappears in the moment of its delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the unnatural narration in Angela Carter's novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and addresses the issue of how to make sense of it. Drawing upon unnatural narratology, it examines the first-person narrator Desiderio's paralepsis, i.e. how he violates the mimetic rules of first-person narration by presenting knowledge that should be inaccessible to him. In terms of interpretation, the study first evaluates two options – the naturalizing one that reads Desiderio as an unreliable narrator and the unnaturalizing one that foregrounds the nonrepresentative nature of the narrative – and identifies their respective deficiencies. It further proposes a form of naturalization that sees first-person narration as modeled on the genre of novel and attributes Desiderio's paralepsis to his narratorial invention. It is argued that in coming to terms with the narrator's omniscient qualities, we should duly consider his characterological motivation and overall performance of narrative authority. Desiderio's assumption of competencies that he does not properly have in fact reflects a desire for control and mastery over his life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written eighteen years apart Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem (2010) [Jerusalem. Nick Hern Books] and Angela Carter's final novel Wise Children (1992) [Wise children. Vintage Classics] both attempt to recreate a sense of Englishness for the marginalised 'under-class' of post-imperial England without falling prey to nationalist interpretations. The two texts present raucous, vulgar protagonists who force an alternative rebellious form of proudly proletarian English identity into being. Where Carter's work is seen against the post-war backdrop of industrial decline, Butterworth's work is connected to a renewed interest in vernacular rural English culture. The action of both texts take place on one day, 23 April, making use of the fact that the day of national celebration, St George's Day, coincides with that of Shakespeare's birthday. Both texts, in fact, reclaim the mainstays of English national identity, Shakespeare and the myth of St George and recast them with characters who revel in the enactment of their anti-establishment identities. This paper will argue that the purposefully unruly behaviour of the protagonists of these texts continue the tradition of incivility as a form of social resistance in England, allowing the creation and assertion of an alternative Englishness that emanates from the margins and sees its roots in Shakespearean bawdiness and England's pagan past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deirdre Sullivan is an award-winning Irish YA writer who has been praised by several writers and folklore academics, such as Jack Zipes, for her fairy-tale revisions and her rewriting of the Irish legend “The Children of Lir”. Following the steps of contemporary feminist writers like Angela Carter or Emma Donoghue, Sullivan gives voice to minorities and deals with silenced topics such as sexual harassment. This interview focuses on her subversions of fairy tales and Irish mythology, especially in her collection Tangleweed and Brine (2017) and her revision of “The Children of Lir” in Savage Her Reply (2020). In this interview, Deirdre Sullivan talks about her interest in fairy tales and Irish folklore and how she became a writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Girls' initiation contributes to cultural representations in Western folk fairy tales. This study examines girls' initiation in three contemporary versions of "Little Red Riding Hood", Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" and "Wolf-Alice" (1979), and Märta Tikkanen's Rödluvan (Little Red Riding Hood, 1986), in relation to "The Story of Grandmother", popularized by Paul Delarue (1956). Combining fairy-tale research with Kristevan theories on subjectivity, the feminine, and the genius, it examines how initiation assigns to the girl in Delarue's tale a social identity and role as a woman and how the contemporary tales negotiate this through the heroines' wooing of werewolves. The findings, presented in both written and visual forms, show the reach of the heroines' feminine psychosexual maturity, here called the girl genius, in Carter's and Tikkanen's versions, representing an alternative to traditional assumptions of girls' psychosexuality within normative heterosexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her deconstruction and reconstruction of some of the most famous fairytales, Angela Carter not only challenges some of the most enduring concepts and binary oppositions, but she also introduces novel ways of looking at and thinking about cultural phenomena deeply rooted in the Western Culture, in a critique of Western patriarchal society. One of these is the concept of the Other, which she masterfully treats in one of the short stories from The Bloody Chamber collection and that is The Lady of the House of Love. In it, she subverts our notions of who the Other is, how that Other became seen as such and what actually makes them the Other. Late 19th century ideas on Otherness, including those set by our treatment and perception of those who are culturally different from us, influence this representation heavily. Not only culturally, but Angela Carter touches upon ideas of the Other from a philosophical and psychological standpoint as well, and this essay will present these ideas through examples from the story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on intergenerational female relationships in "Little Red Riding Hood" often stresses conflict. Examining such relationships from the perspective of adolescent daughtering through Julia Kristeva's idea of the feminine in three contemporary versions of the story, Angela Carter's "The Werewolf", Kiki Smith's "Bedlam", and Gillian Cross's Wolf, this study demonstrates that some friction is necessary for recreating the protagonists' grandmaternal relationship, which positively highlights female bonding and enhances the protagonists' maturity and feminine development to embrace new beginnings with an environmental twist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“I found myself, as I grew older, increasingly writing about sexuality and its manifestations in human practice. And I found most of my raw material in the lumber room of the Western European imagination,” Angela Carter wrote in “Notes from the Front Line.” The passage is significant for several reasons. Carter identifies sexuality in its diverse manifestations as her main concern and acknowledges images derived from European popular tradition as the source of her “raw material.” Moreover, she characterises her prose as intertextual and identifies herself as a Caucasian Westerner. It is from this contemporary, Europe-centred perspective that she, first, surveys manifestations of sexuality, and then uses them to create her own—often allegorical—imaginative stories. This paper is concerned with the former stage of Carter’s intellectual endeavour: surveying expressions of sexuality in public discourse from a Western woman’s point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how continuity is dealt with in fictional feminist texts that depict gender or sexuate transition, via surgical intervention or transmogrification, in terms of naming and pronoun use, self-image, and perceived image. The texts here examined—literary and filmic works by cis artists Angela Carter, Sally Potter, and Octavia Butler, principally—all pastiche the familiar narratological mode of transsexual autobiography, aping the convention of internal focalization, though each elides the wrong-body formula that frequently accompanies such narratives to justify access to medical treatment and care. I situate each alongside scholarly engagements with transsexual embodiment, surgery, and lived experience, with particular focus on flesh as that which both contains and determines gendered and sexed readings, to ground these fictive accounts of becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the exhibition "Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter" and the interplay between image and text in Angela Carter's work. It explores the significance of visuality in Carter's writing process and the exhibition's selection of artworks. It also emphasizes the connection between Carter's writing and her visual artistry and discusses the fusion of art and literature in her creative method.

A literary criticism of the novel "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter is presented. It focuses on the subversion of patriarchal narrative structures, the deconstruction of binary notions of gender and sexuality, and the exploration of queer desires and relationships. It highlights Carter's transformative and revolutionary approach to fairy tale retellings.

A literary criticism of the novel "The Magic Toyshop" by Angela Carter is presented. It examines the novel's exploration of gender roles and power dynamics, the utilization of symbolism and imagery, and the subversion of conventional narrative structures. It also offers a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of these aspects of the book.

The article focuses on Angela Carter's global perspective and the impact of her encounters with different cultures on her writing. It examines her diverse literary genres, inclusive feminism, and exploration of colonialism and Orientalism. It highlights specific stories that illustrate communication failures and the challenges of understanding foreign others, emphasizing the themes of connection, translation, and celebrating diversity.

This paper considers Angela Carter's engagement with the late-nineteenth century in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus through the lens of neo-Victorian decadence and in parallel with the writer's ongoing reflection on femininity and gender roles, as she articulated it in her non-fiction throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The main focus is on fin de siècle imagery and its subsequent revisions in feminist art and thought, in the light of the concept of crossmapping, which looks beyond intertextuality, and can thus account for Carter's complex interweaving of images and texts across two different epochs, that she both constructed as decadent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to critically explore Angela Carter's use of colour symbolisms in her short story "The Bloody Chamber" (1979). By focussing on the recurrent invocation of three major colours, namely red, black and white, the paper studies how chromatic coding becomes a potent rhetorical device through which the psychological and physical implications of gendered violence are negotiated in Carter's story. Paying close attention to the protagonist's interaction with an aesthetically stimulating narrative world, steeped in visceral colours, the paper attempts at problematizing the politics of victimisation and female agency that underlies the entire narrative. Carter's deployment of colour symbolisms has a quasi-theatrical dimension that tends to visualise the subversive implications of the text. Keeping that in mind, the paper seeks to crack the chromatic codes at multiple levels; for instance, red is studied in context to patriarchal violation of female bodies, as an embodiment of female desire and a manifestation of female bonding. Black is read through the lens of motherhood where it becomes a visual trope that deconstructs the prototype of an ideal mother and individualises her as a redemptive and rebellious figure. Finally, by paying attention to Carter's use of the colour white, the paper seeks to trace its dual purpose in perpetuating invisibilization of female desire and charging the act of seeing with an agential import. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Al-Adab / Al-ādāb is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The contemporary British author Angela Carter in The Passion of New Eve (1977) creates a discourse that exposes, critically revises and rewrites patriarchal myths of femininity including the Christian myth of origin, and the myth of hermaphrodite. More specifically, this study shows Carter's impetus to demythologize the false "universals" of archetype of motherhood, womanhood and manhood in an attempt to unsettle categorical polarizations of feminine and masculine. Carter's The Passion of New Eve illustrates the way gender ambiguity and sexual fluidity is constructed by the revision of the mythical material, which allows the reader to question gender dynamics and reconsider the categories of sex and sexuality with variation in mind. Then, this study will briefly give the answer for the following question: what stimulates this twentieth century women novelist to construct an alternative discourse, reflecting upon non-normative identification and its implications in the mainstream society. Her critique of reality created by the "social fictions" of patriarchal order formulates the argument that gender is not a biologically determined essence, but an illusion, a repeated and learned imitation of heterosexual ideal regulated by gender performance. Accordingly, this study foregrounds continual fluidity, becoming and ambiguity between genders as a way of dismantling sexual and gender polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakültesi Dergisi DTCF Dergisi is the property of Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakultesi (DTCF Dergisi) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In her short story "The lady of the House of Love", Angela Carter experiments with feminist postmodern gothic literature and foregrounds the importance of space and time in imprisoning the female body. The writer contrasts the space and time within the constraints of the vampire's palace with those of the cyclist's external free world. The vampire symbolizes the submissive female who is ensnared by the ghostly presence of her patriarchal ancestors within the confines of the patriarchal chivalric space and time. Carter's feminist postmodern storytelling aims to defy the patriarchal spatial and temporal frames by providing the lady of the house of love with a possibility of survival beyond the time and space of her ancestral gothic palace. During the daylight, the vampire sleeps, whereas at night, she awakes to chase her human masculine preys with whom she makes love before killing and eating them. Within the limits of patriarchal setting, the vampire's role is limited to sexuality and denied any human emotions until the arrival of the new man who succeeds to stir her emotions and revives her human instincts. The dreary atmosphere of the castle with its gothic architecture have not hindered the new man, together with the vampire, from challenging and deconstructing the traditional patriarchal order. The roles space and time play in achieving female liberty are significant. The vampire's death within her ancestral castle promotes her survival outside it, in another space and time, where she blooms after severing with the patriarchal spatial and temporal setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Points of connection between John Banville and Angela Carter are rarely noted. This article argues for a fuller appreciation of their interinfluence upon one another as it uses their circus novels Birchwood (1973) and Nights at the Circus (1984) to explore the relationship between revisionism and nostalgia in both historiography and literature. It asks why Banville and Carter both imagine the circus as a vehicle for their revisionary work and examines how these authors manage what Carter terms 'the pseudo-memory of nostalgia'. In doing so, this article tests the extent to which nostalgia and revision might be understood as opposing or even antithetical concepts and explores the high stakes of keeping lived experience at arm's length. Birchwood and Nights at the Circus are read here in context. Instructive comparisons are drawn with journalism and letters written by Banville and Carter in the 1970s and 1980s, and relevant works of historiography from a similar period. This article also incorporates material from an interview with John Banville which reveals his self-consciously fraught relationship with Birchwood's themes and content. More broadly, it is a notable attempt to indicate and assess the significance of Irish literature and culture in Carter's writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the translation process in poetry considering the works of Angela Carter as a translator. Carter was a noted British author, best known for her novels and rewrites of fairy tales, and for her works related to science fiction. For this article, by using the book Unicorn: the poetry of Angela Carter (2015) and based on Lefevere's theories of translation (1975, 1992, 2003) we propose a translation exercise from English into Brazilian Portuguese of an excerpt from her poem - namesake - titled "Unicorn". In this sense, we seek to understand how literary creation and literary translation are presented in Carter's work as a wordsmith - an artist of the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically speaking, fairy tales have been powerful instruments in the education of children and in the transmission of moral standards from one generation to the next, from the dominant class to less powerful groups. As they make certain ways of life or ideals appear attractive and others repellent, fairy tales also contribute to form normative identities in their young readers. A normative identity combines a descriptive account of who one is with a normative account of what one ought to do. Such identities can be empowering or disempowering. Fairy tales can be seen as using a technique of narrative persuasion to impose normative identities on their audiences, making certain ideals and ways of life appear natural and self-evident. To deconstruct a disempowering normative identity imposed by a fairy tale involves separating its descriptive and normative components and making vivid the problematic aspects of the norms, values, and ideals involved. In this article, we analyse Angela Carter's deconstruction of a disempowering normative identity imposed on women by the Ashputtle fairy tale, as told by the Grimm brothers. In our analysis, based on close reading and philosophical criticism, we reveal how Carter herself makes use of the fairy-tale technique of narrative persuasion in her deconstructive work, vividly bringing out certain appalling consequences of the ideals of submission and self-sacrifice implied by the Grimm version of the Ashputtle story, thereby also subverting that version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the development of a feature-length screenplay adaptation of Angela Carter's short story "Flesh and the Mirror," situating it within a critical discussion of her metaleptic narrative strategies and the challenges of translating them to the screen. The screenplay incorporates Carter's Japanese short stories and journalism, which are said to be her most autobiographical writings. The article explores Carter's attitude to life writing and highlights the dangers of a straightforward biographical adaptation, contextualizing her Japanese writings within her wider engagement with Japanese literature and the I-novel. It demonstrates how the screenplay aims to emulate Carter's playful experimentation with narrative form, overlapping metaphors of magic mirrors, puppetry, theater, and film sets, attempting a delicate balancing act of transposing Carter's "literary gymnastics" to the silver screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the echo of modern Japanese literature in Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), which was written in Tokyo and Chiba, paying particular attention to four of the most influential authors in this intertextual novel: Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima. Significantly, as well as being innovators of Japanese fiction, these writers were also great reinterpreters of Western literary legacies, who constructed their own original styles by absorbing both Japanese and non-Japanese literary traditions. The article, therefore, explores how Carter reencountered Western literary legacies through reading modern Japanese literature in order to clarify her feminist and political responses to the reinterpretation of the European and American canon by authors from the Far East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angela Carter's experiences in Japan molded her post-Japan writing: she became more preoccupied with the nature of reality and the status of the subject, which operates for her like Roland Barthes's empty sign, whose sole reality is its appearance. Carter sought a new model of writing too, which she found partly in bunraku. This paper analyzes the role of bunraku in triggering Carter's overlapping narrative and ontological frames. That metaleptic turn enables her to disclose the constructedness of the subject in general and the gendered subject in particular. In "The Loves of Lady Purple" and "Flesh and the Mirror," Carter draws on bunraku for a system of representation that metatextually discloses itself as an aesthetic construction and of its subjects as discursive productions of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates Angela Carter's Japanese writings in the context of multiple interconnected discourses in the 1960s and 1970s: on the one hand, anti-imperialism, postcolonialism, and feminism among European intellectuals and, on the other hand, "self-orientalism," anti-Western nationalism, and global capitalism in postwar Japan. As a white woman in Japan, Carter was not only, as previously argued by scholars, doubly objectified as woman and foreigner, but "subjectified" in a patriarchal/colonialist discourse and made aware of her complicity in objectifying, emasculating, and exploiting the native. Carter's Japanese and post-Japan writings reflect a newly acquired awareness of gender in a colonial context, demonstrated by her conscious use of male pronouns and gender transitions, effectively problematizing the othering tendency of European orientalists and the Japanese self-orientalist exploitation of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of Japanese folktales in Angela Carter's oeuvre, focusing especially on the figure of the Japanese fox trickster that appears in Fireworks, Love, and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. In these works, the shape-shifting body of the East-Asian fox becomes a site of conflict between contrasting categories (male/female, European/Asian, human/animal) and mirrors the process by which the characters are turned into commodified, fictionalized representations of gender and race. The trickster's ability to shift across the animal–human border also provides Carter with a narrative device to interrogate the cultural boundaries that define both sexuality and humanity (as opposed to bestiality)—a topic that prefigures her critique of patriarchal and anthropocentric hierarchies in The Bloody Chamber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation plays a central role as a creative method in Angela Carter's Fireworks (1974). The collection of stories showcases Carter's multilingual musings on the word hanabi by opening with "A Souvenir of Japan," which records a brief moment of bliss during the Japanese summer festival, captured in the image of the "morning glories of the night." It then builds on its literary and cultural resonances in English, French, and Japanese to form a variegated bouquet of stories linked by the flower motif that gives the collection its aesthetic identity. Infused by Carter's experience of Japan and memories of Baudelaire, Buñuel, and Bashō, Fireworks exemplifies Carter's translational poetics as a mode of writing blossoming across intertwined languages, cultures, and art forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Carter's portrayal of the intersections of race, gender, and nationalism through imagery drawn from the nationalist tales Momotaro (Peach Boy) and through figuration of the lion and the unicorn in her writing during and after staying in Japan. Analyzing Miss Z and Fireworks , we argue that Carter's depictions of fantastical creatures reveal a proto-intersectional awareness of complex power interconnections between race and gender, specifically in relation to ideas of whiteness and masochism. Like her contemporary Taeko Kono, Carter critiques men's masochism and theorizes a type of feminine masochism. Carter grows in awareness of both racial politics (whiteness) and masochism in Japanese culture and attempts to grasp the "essence of the other's otherness" therein. In doing so, she conceptualizes intersectional power relations of gender and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Angela Carter's private journals and the British Library's 2000 pages of letters from her time in Japan to explore Carter's evolving thinking about the intersections between race, gender, power, and sexuality, from casual expressions of racist stereotypes in the early works through a more radical interrogation of those stereotypes, to a later, more intersectional approach to feminism and race. It explores her uncollected writings for men's magazines, such as Men Only and Club International, where she describes Japanese attitudes towards sexuality and the practice of irezumi, Japanese tattooing, which she analyzes as an index of a Japanese culture of "repression, narcissism, masochism and superstition" ("Irezumi" 96). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), the protagonist Fevvers is a character with an overwhelming bodily presence, whose identity is mediated through her bodily performances and via the viewership of the spectacle that is her “self”. Always facing the question “Is she fact or is she a fiction?”, the real identity and being of Fevvers seems to escape the reader through her magnified corporeality and performativity. Yet, as the episodes in which Fevvers performs as inanimate objects or is juxtaposed next to them show, the corporeal existence of Fevvers harbors many posthuman possibilities for subjectivity, even though Fevvers is also discovered to be severely marked by her human identity and femininity. Using a theoretical framework informed by writings on thing theory, posthumanism, and posthuman feminism, this paper explores the hybrid bodily existence of Fevvers from a post humanist angle to point out that despite demonstrating a general intuition towards a posthuman understanding of subjectivity and feminism as also claimed by former critics, Nights at the Circus finally dismisses such possibilities for a “corporeal feminism” as manifestoed by Elizabeth Grozs. Staying loyal to her human nature, the novel’s protagonist Fevvers turns down possibilities offered by her animal, thing, and machine beings and subsumes her hybridity under corporeal feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Neophilologica is the property of Acta Neophilologica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article conducts a comparative analysis of two classics of postmodern fantastic fiction: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) by the English author Angela Carter and Evening Act (1981) by the Croatian author Pavao Pavličić. The analysis is concentrated on the various ways these novels employ and re-examine traditional notions of representation, evoking, in particular, the idea of the simulacrum as a "false" or "deceitful" image/sign (as elaborated by Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Lachmann). While Carter places the primary focus on the conjunction between simulacra and desire and the (im)possibility of liberating imagination, with a feminist inflection, Pavličić foregrounds the relationship between originality and falsifying, which is also inevitably intertwined with the relationship between art and institutional power. Notwithstanding the differences, the two narratives employ some analogous motifs and devices, and engage with a number of similar issues, that relate both to the postmodern and the fantastic's challenge to the conventionally accepted ideas and limits of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the relationship of authors Fay Weldon and Angela Carter with feminism by analyzing undecidability as their feminist strategy in their novels. Also cited are the encounter of feminism with postmodernism in Weldon's novel "Praxis" and Carter's "The Passion of New Eve," as well as the feminist arguments of Diane Elam, Mara Reisman, and Patricia Waugh.

While much attention has been paid to Angela Carter's intertextual appropriation of Shakespeare and her interrogation of the patriarchal ideology at work in his representations of familial strife, critics tend to focus on Carter's final novel, Wise Children. Shakespeare's influence on Carter's earlier novel, Nights at the Circus, has gone largely unremarked. Like Wise Children, Nights at the Circus builds a bricolage of Shakespearean allusions, but it more subtly reconsiders the ontological issues of legitimacy by returning to Shakespeare's interest in ambiguity, in deniability, in time, and in space. I argue that Nights at the Circus appropriates and shatters Shakespeare's disruptive methods concerning the materiality of time in The Winter's Tale and Hamlet. In so doing, Carter reverses time and dismembers space to criticise the masculine-made-legitimate at the expense of the feminine, which Shakespeare's temporal and spatial manipulations ultimately uphold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Desiderius Erasmus' "Copia" is not only inscribed with rhetorical interpretations but also implied with semiotic meanings. This paper starts from the definition, components, and functions of "Copia" and then analyzes Nights at the Circus from two aspects: the abundance of expression and the abundance of subject-matter, through discussing the employment of metaphor and antonomasia, the dividing of a whole into parts, and the tracing of causes in this novel. This research finds that the use of "Copia" can not only contribute to the richness and variety of style but also highlight the characters' personalities and enable Angela Carter to discuss political and social issues such as patriarchy and individual rights. From a perspective of Bakhtin's cultural semiotics, the paper aims to explore "Copia" semiotic meanings in literary classics and provide alternative interpretations of this conception in literary criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop tells the story of the claustrophobic lives of six characters who find themselves stuck in the house of Uncle Philip, who demands absolute submission from them and who isolates them from the wider world. Uncle Philip acts like the Freudian Primordial Father who feels free to act in any way he likes disregarding any restrictions. By forcing the household members to work in his toyshop all day, he creates a solipsistic universe, which is cut off from the network of the symbolic in Lacanian terms. In this world, their living practice deviates from the norms of traditional discourse as there is incest between the siblings, or as they heavily engage in pre-or extra-linguistic representation of reality such as drawing, dancing, making music and toys. Aunt Margaret becomes dumb on her wedding night, or Uncle Philip does not send the siblings to school, which, in Lacanian terms, is a codifying space of the Law. For these reasons, Uncle Philip’s house embodies the heterogeneity of the imaginary residues rather than submission to the organising principles of the symbolic. Theirs becomes an alternative site of being to the one outside. This essay aims to explore the psychodynamics of the characters’ relations to one another, the unconventional intrasubjectivity created between them in this unconventional space and the implications of imaginary residues in their living practice using Lacanian ideas as my conceptual backcloth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angela Carter and Ghazaleh Alizadeh as the prophetesses of postmodern fairy tales in British and Persian literature re-narrativize these tales as a loophole from socio-political stagnation and cultural paralysis. Evading direct contact with the political jargons of their eras, they seek gender generativity via the fairy tale machine. Alizadeh finds refuge in modernizing Persian fairy tales. Carter chants her frustration at Thatcherism through gender subversion. Carter's and Alizadeh's revulsion at the politics of gender in their eras can be read via the duet between the abject and the chora in Kristeva's thought. It is through the encounter with the external abject that the internal abject is activated culminating in the efflorescence of the chora. The liminality of the chora becomes the battleground on which poetics of gender beats off politics of logos through subversion and syncretism. While Carter obtains abjection through overt sexualization of fairy tales, Alizadeh resorts to indirection due to the political climate of her time. Unlike Carter who is quite outspoken about her fairy tale project, Alizadeh is reticent, allusive, and somber trying to remind her readers of the gloomy reality that being a woman in the Middle Eastern countries is always already punctuated with docility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]