Re-visiting Angela Carter

From fairy tale to French decadence, from medieval literature to Victoriana, and from cookery books to high theory, Angela Carter's narratives are littered with allusions and references drawn from a wide range of cultural spheres. Nevertheless, reading Carter's intertextuality merely in terms of postmodernist textual procedure effaces the theoretical and political import of her work. Focusing on questions of intertextuality, authorship and representation, Re-Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts offers a re-examination of one of the twentieth century's most important and contentious British writers. While the introductory essay theorizes the politics of Carter's intellectual and textual strategies, the individual chapters re-visit her relationship to key literary and cultural influences (e.g. Shakespeare, the Gothic, Japan) and illuminate neglected ones (e.g. Jean-Luc, Godard, Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, surrealism). This provocative and timely collection both offers new readings of Carter's opus, and contributes to contemporary critical debates concerning gender, postmodernism and intertextual theory.