Angela Carter

At the time of her death in 1992, Angela Carter had become an important and widely read British writer. However, as the author of a collection of essays entitled Nothing Sacred, she would probably have found her own canonization amusing. In the first book-length study devoted to her novels, Linden Peach demonstrates how Carter's fiction has retained the power to surprise and agitate. This lively book provides both close readings of individual texts and an overview of her work. Arguing that Carter often begins with our 'conclusions', it discusses the challenges that her novels mount to popular preconceptions and conventions. It offers an in-depth discussion of Carter's much neglected first novel, Shadow Dance, and suggests fresh approaches to other texts, including Carter's indebtedness to Euro-American Gothic and her concern with carnivalesque and theatre as sites of illegitimate power. Carter's fiction is interpreted within frameworks derived from the work of Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, Melanie Klein and Bertolt Brecht.