Angela Carter and Folk Music: ‘Invisible Music’, Prose and the Art of Canorography

About the Author Polly Paulusma is an independent scholar and professional musician based in the UK.Jennifer Gustar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada. She is an Associate Member of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Her research currently focusses on contemporary women writers, with special interest in writers of diaspora. She is North American reviews editor for Contemporary Women Writers and has published on a range of women fiction writers such as Anita Rau Badami, Bernardine Evaristo, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, and Elizabeth Knox.Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, UK. She is the author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (MUP, 2016), winner of the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. She has authored, edited and co-edited over 30 books. This will be her third edited book on Angela Carter. Recently she made a film on Carter's The Bloody Chamber for Massolit, for use in schools (33,000 downloads). She was the co-curator of the Strange Worlds exhibition on Angela Carter at the Royal West Academy of Art in Bristol 2017 and co-edited the catalogue. She is the co-founder of Women's Writing, for which she serves as Editor and runs two Carter websites with Charlotte Crofts. Product Description From her unique standpoint as singer-songwriter-scholar, Polly Paulusma examines the influences of Carter's 1960s folk singing, unknown until now, on her prose writing. Recent critical attention has focused on Carter's relationship with folk/fairy tales, but this book uses a newly available archive containing Carter's folk song notes, books, LPs and recordings to change the debate, proving Carter performed folk songs. Placing this archive alongside the album sleeve notes Carter wrote and her diaries and essays, it reimagines Carter's prose as a vehicle for the singing voice, and reveals a writing style imbued with 'songfulness' informed by her singing praxis.Reading Carter's texts through songs she knew and sang, this book shows, from influences of rhythm, melodic shape, thematic focus, imagery, 'voice' and 'breath', how Carter steeped her writing with folk song's features to produce 'canorography': song-infused prose. Concluding with a discussion of Carter's profound influence on songwriters, focusing on the author's interview with Emily Portman, this book invites us to reimagine Carter's prose as audial event, dissolving boundaries between prose and song, between text and reader, between word and sound, in an ever-renewing act of sympathetic resonance.