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The novels Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter and Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson rely on common narrative tactics and deal with very similar subject matter. This paper contains a brief comparison of the three novels in terms of their stylistic qualities, focusing on Carter's and Winterson's combination of magic realism, the picaresque mode, mythology, and historiographic metafiction with Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of carnival and the grotesque body, with a common aim of unmasking the stereotypical socially constructed ideas regarding the female body. The two authors use the grotesque bodies of their heroines as a site of resistance to and carnivalesque overthrow of imposed social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]