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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]

Published in 1977 with a great deal of controversy within European feminist circles, Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One presents the author's commentary on the modern phallocentric culture, commodification of women and their counteraction disguised within the very patriarchal structures. Irigaray, for instance, views womanliness and female submissiveness as a strategy that women have always made use of in order to develop a much more unfettered self behind such masks. Women masquerade as objects to be consumed to achieve a freer voice from the patriarchal discourse and to establish themselves as the ultimate subjects of a never-ending cultural exchange. Irigaray's views on female strategies such as masquerade and performativity are applicable to a feminist reading of Angela Carter's famous postmodern novel, Nights at the Circus (1984), which critiques the patriarchal ideology with its suggestion of a New Woman. Fevvers, the protagonist of the novel, imprisons the male voice in the novel behind the invisible cage of her own world of performances and uses her womanliness to suppress the male willpower to the degree of self-submission. In this respect, this study argues that Carter's generation of Fevvers as the New Woman is reminiscent of what Irigaray theorizes in her above article with respect to questions like womanliness, masquerade and performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents literary criticism of the book "Nights at the Circus" by Angela Carter. Particular focus is given to themes of femininity and spectacle surrounding the book's protagonist, Fevvers, a woman who is half-bird and half-human. According to the author, this character challenges social norms regarding gender, sexuality, and nationality. The photograph "Kath Moonan, London 2006" by Del LeGrace Volcano and its relationship to the book's themes are also discussed.

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]

In the long-lasting history of patriarchy, women, as feminists remind us, have been "the other" of the society, who are encaged in several established institutions in order to be monitored by the dominant discourse. In Nights at the Circus, Carter goes to these institutions and their oppressed inhabitants in order to shed light on these previously neglected territories. Her goal is to depict the long-age history of women's objectification and to deconstruct the dominant discourse by the symbolic destruction of these marginal institutions. By analyzing two of these marginal institutions, the brothel and the freak show, the present paper wishes to demonstrate how Carter accomplishes her feminist mission. The whores, likewise, are portrayed as potential revolutionary elements who, finally, stand up to patriarchy and its domineering norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus rewrites Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to present a powerful critique of the optimism implied by the classical Bildungsroman. Carter insists that self-realisation and socialisation cannot be reconciled; rather, the possibility of personal transformation and self-fashioning is predicated upon the occurrence of social change. The narrative of Nights at the Circus is punctuated by a series of disruptions of narrative continuity, which are not in themselves sufficient to induce change but constitute significant opportunities that must be seized. The voluntaristic implications of this emphasis on the conjuncture are counterbalanced by Carter's insistence on the importance of reciprocal relationships in shaping the individual and of acting out virtue in a public arena. Carter's ironic utopianism exhorts her readers to dare to imagine a reality in which confidence, reciprocity and love do not need to appear in the mode of irony. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is perhaps no novel that offers a more scathing commentary on nineteenth century conceptions of leisure and industry than Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Dickens' description of Coketown, nay Preston, is a caricature of utilitarian uniformity and the commodification of workers in post-industrial England. Ostensibly Marxist in its depictions of those men of "facts and calculations"-clearly Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith-Dickens offers a community of "hands" covered in soot toiling under the vulgar Bounderby. Counterpoised against these laborers is the whimsical cast of Mr. Sleary's circus. Using the circus as a corollary to the dystopian city, he anticipates Angela Carter's Neovictorian romp through London, St. Petersberg, and Siberia wherein the characters of Nights at the Circus likewise offer an antidote to similarly oppressive prescriptions for economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's view on the "Nights at the Circus" novel by Angela Carter, which criticizes Great Britain Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The author explores the character Sophie Fevvers, which he describes as the grotesque image possessing wings that used by Carter to ironically represent imperialistic politics of Thatcher. He also note Carter's use for U.S. to represent cultural imperialism in the U.S. that has marginalize Great Britain and distance its imperial identity.

"Nights at the Circus" (1984), set at the turn of the twentieth century, is dominated by winged aerialiste Fevvers, a woman with the stature of a goddess and an appetite to match. This article explores how Fevvers, as Carter's version of the "New Woman," negotiates men's and her own appetites in order to claim a share of power. Fevvers refuses the metaphorical and material self-starvation attendant upon conventional paradigms of femininity, instead overtly performing both her appetites (and the pleasure she takes from their satisfaction), and her body—an exemplar of the Bakhtinian grotesque, which flagrantly defies patriarchal injunctions of passivity and self-attenuation. Carter—herself a long-term anorexic—utilizes the trope of feminine eating, a locus of gendered power relations, in conjunction with images and metaphors of performance, to comment on how interactions with the social, cultural and physical forces of appetite can reflect and inform contemporary sexual relations in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes Lorelei Lee from Anita Loos's novel "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1925) so appealing is her ability to manipulate her own image and effectively become mistress of her own grand confidence game. Christina Britzolakis questioned the viability of reading the "feminine spectacle" as a particularly feminist undertaking. Although Britzolakis is right to point to the patriarchal underpinnings that inform the male gaze, the author argues that the rhetorical construction of the wise-cracking, self-reflexive blonde often enacts a critique on the system of commodification and objectification that she appears to uphold, thus meriting more critical and scholarly attention. More specifically she investigates the parallel rhetorical strategies in Anita Loos's novel and Angela Carter's "Nights at the Circus."

Focuses on the style applied in writing the book "Nights at the Circus," by Angela Carter. Emphasis on the theoretical speculation of a possible model of narrative dynamics that challenges traditional metanarratives; Aid of the figure of Cassandra to offer a provocative trope for postmodern feminist narratives; Consideration of oedipal narratives as sexuality with certain textuality.

This paper examines performativity in its relation to textuality, corporeality and femininity in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984). I wish to reveal parallel spectacular, seductive and tricky performances of bodies and texts. My reading of spectacular corporeal and textual performances focuses on the heroine, revealing how Fevvers' parading deconstructive performances of ideologically prescribed femininity, and its limiting representations, coincide with the narrative's spectacular revisions of literary genres and writing styles, identified by discursive technologies of power with femininity and thus conventionally canonized as sentimentally kitsch or incomprehensibly hysterical modes of writing. My gender sensitive, reader-response approach also highlights the bifocal pleasures, tender irony and sisterly burlesque of the self-mockingly silly and histrionic hysteric "feminine" textual performance in order to reveal that the conventional concepts of a domineering patriarchal language violently incorporating and domineering weaker écriture féminine are demythologized. My final aim is to examine how Fevvers' confidence trick unveils that there are other wor(l)ds available for daring women writers and readers alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses several contemporary stories that use monstrous bodies. Angela Carter's 'Nights at the Circus';Salman Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses'; 'Geek Love,' by Katherine Dunn.

Discusses the interpretation of readership in Angela Carter's metafictional feminist novel `Nights at the Circus'. Analysis of the relationship between the writer and the reader as told from the characters; Misreading of a the book as a romance no vel instead of metafiction; Treatment of the love plot; Reference to women authors of metafictional novels.

Examines the book `Nights at the Circus,' by Angela Carter. Carter's point that myths belong to a system of discourse; Marginalization of women in male-centered discourses; Observation in the novel's beginning.

Analyzes the feminist theories espoused by Angela Carter in her novel `Nights at the Circus.' Description of the central character; Postmodern elements emphasized in the novel; Difference of Carter's novel with other feminist writings; Discussion on the objectification of women and its purpose; Concept of Marxist feminism in the novel; Social analysis of prostitution.

The article takes the theory of the carnivalesque rebirth as a means of reading the corporeal excess and ambivalence of the performativity of Fewers, a character in Angela Carter's novel "Nights at the Circus," as a destabilisation of the assumed causality between corporeality and ontology. According to the article, the novel's Rabelaisian corporeality emphasizes the dual body, the lower bodily stratum, and the iconoclastic ambiguities of language and image in reclamation of the bodily potential that is effaced by discourses of scientific and masculinist rationalism. It explains how the novel encourages readers to recognize their complicity with the voyeuristic quest of the character Walser for the truth.