(1940-1992) UK author best known for her work outside the sf field, though all her novels and tales were characterized by an expressionist freedom of reference to everyday "reality" (see Magic Realism) which often emerges as fantasy. She won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for her second novel, The Magic Toyshop (1967), and the Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions (1968). Her first tale to engage in a recognizably sf displacement of reality, Heroes and Villains (1969), does so with a similar freedom, for Carter was one of the few UK writers of genuine Fabulations, of Postmodernist works in which storytelling conventions are mixed and examined, and in which the style of telling is strongly language-oriented. Heroes and Villains is set in a Ruined-Earth England inhabited by (a) dwellers in the ruins of Cities, whose society is rigidly stratified into Professors and the Soldiers who guard them, and (b) Barbarians who live in the surreal mutated forests that cover the land. Like much of her work, the novel uses Gothic images and conventions to examine and to Parody the concerns of its protagonists and the desolate world they inhabit. In the story of Marianne, a Professor's daughter, who leaves the ruined city for a Barbarian life where she undergoes a violent erotic awakening, Carter definitively entangles Sex and decadence (or female freedom).
Erotic complexities, shamans and deliquescent urban landscapes proliferate in such later novels as The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972; vt The War of Dreams 1974), which is a quest into dream, several narrative sections of which are clearly influenced by Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), so that the protagonist's increasing immersion in oneiric grotesquerie begins to resemble a trip through an abstract Archipelago; The Passion of New Eve (1977) is a baroque picaresque through a Holocaust-enflamed America; and Nights at the Circus (1984), in which a grandly fabulated, densely conceived phantasmagorical world surrounds the tale of a "deformed" woman performer whose wings are real, whose womanhood is no deformity, and for whom flight is real through all the spectrums of meaning which may attach to the concept of flight, especially where women are concerned. Carter's stories were collected as: Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (coll 1974; rev 1987), assembled with the non-genre Love (1971; rev 1987) as Artificial Fire (omni 1988); The Bloody Chamber (coll 1979), a series of contes dissective of female sexuality; and Black Venus (coll 1985; rev vt Saints and Strangers 1986), which includes Black Venus's Tale (1980 chap). Though she was never associated with the sf New Wave, it was perhaps through the widening of the gates of perception due to that movement that readers of sf were induced to treat Carter's difficult but rewarding work as being of interest to a genre audience; as an author of feminist sf (see Feminism), she was notably lacking in doctrinaire presentations of story, and her influence has grown steadily – for some time after her death, she was the most taught woman writer in American universities. Her early and unnecessary death – she could not break her addiction to cigarettes, and died of lung cancer – continues to induce a sense that the British literary world had been diminished. [JC]
see also: Anthropology; Disaster; Fantastic Voyages; Fantasy; History of SF; Mythology; Perception; Psychology; Werewolves; Women SF Writers.
Angela Olive Stalker Carter
born Eastbourne, Sussex: 7 May 1940
died London: 16 February 1992
works (selected)
collections and stories
- Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) [story: chap: hb/Eros Keith]
- The Donkey Prince (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) [story: chap: hb/Eros Keith]
- Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London: Quartet Books, 1974) [coll: hb/The Green Bay Packers Art Co]
- The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1979) [coll: hb/Malcolm Ashman]
- Black Venus's Tale (London: Next Editions, 1980) [story: chap: pb/Philip Sutton]
- Black Venus (London: Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1985) [coll: includes Black Venus's Tale above: hb/Barbara Kaiser]
- Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1985) [plays: coll: hb/from Richard Dadd]
- American Ghosts & Old World Wonders (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993) [coll: hb/from Georges de la Tour]
- Sea-Cat and Dragon King (London: Bloomsbury Children's Books, 2000) [story: chap: hb/Eva Tatcheva]
- The Collected Angela Carter: Burning Your Boats (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995) [coll: omni: assembling the collected and uncollected short stories: hb/Angela Carter]
- The Collected Angela Carter: The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts, and an Opera (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996) [coll: assembling the collected and uncollected drama: hb/Angela Carter]
nonfiction
works as editor
works as translator
about the author
- Lorna Sage, editor. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (London: Virago, 1994) [nonfiction: anth: pb/]
- Sarah Gamble. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Aidan Day. Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1998) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Linden Peach. Angela Carter (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips, editors. Angela Carter: New Critical Readings (no place given: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012) [nonfiction: anth: pb/]
- Edmund Gordon. The Invention of Angela Carter (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 2017) [nonfiction: hb/]
links
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