Angela Carter and decadence
Subtitle: critical fictions/fictional critiques
By: Maggie Tonkin
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9780230284159
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; Decadence in literature
Description: "By reading key Carter texts alongside their Decadent intertexts, Tonkin interrogates the claim that Carter was in thrall to a fetishistic aesthetic antithetical to her feminism. Through historical contextualization of the woman-as-doll, muse and femme fatale, Tonkin tests Carter's own description of her fiction as a form of literary criticism."--Publisher's website.

British writer Angela Carter described herself as a feminist, yet her fiction scandalized many feminists. With their frequent depictions of sexual violence and women as fetishized objects on display, Carter's novels and short stories referenced many misogynistic male-authored texts from the literary canon, particularly from the tradition of European Decadence. Through a series of juxtaposed readings of Carter's fictions alongside the canonical texts to which she alludes, and a discussion of the critical debates surrounding these texts, Angela Carter and Decadence offers a re-examination of Carter's writing practice. Individual chapters examine her intertextual allusions to Hoffmann, Proust, Poe, Baudelaire and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, with sections on the representation of Woman as doll, Muse and femme fatale. Through its scrutiny of Carter's claim that her fiction is a form of literary criticism, this study contributes forcefully to contemporary scholarly debates about feminism, aesthetics and postmodernist writing practices.