Angela Carter's Nights at the circus / Helen Stoddart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stoddart, Helen.

Series:

Routledge guides to literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Carter, Angela, 1940-1992. Nights at the circus.

Carter, Angela.

Feminist fiction, English--History and criticism.

Feminist fiction, English.

Gothic revival (Literature)--Great Britain.

Gothic revival (Literature).

Great Britain.

Postmodernism (Literature)--Great Britain.

Postmodernism (Literature).

Magic realism (Literature).

Feminism in literature.

Magic in literature.

Circus performers in literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 136 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Routledge, 2007.

Summary:

Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984), a highly original and influential work of modern British literature, combines a fantastically creative plot with a strong political undertone. The result is an emotive and provocative novel, which has attracted much critical attention from a range of perspectives including poststructuralism, gender studies, postmodernism and psychoanalysis.

This guide to Angela Carter's richly complex novel offers: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Nights at the Circus, a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present, a selection of new critical essays on Nights at the Circus, by Jeannette Baxter, Heather Johnson, Sarah Sceats and Helen Stoddart, providing a variety of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section, cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism, suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Nights at the Circus and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Carter's text.

Contents:

1 Text and contexts 1

Angela Carter: biography and writing 3

Academic contexts 4

Internationalism 5

Recognition 6

Britain in the 1890s and the 1980s: Margaret Thatcher 8

Britain in the 1960s: cultural change 10

Literary contexts and beyond 12

Critical contexts 21

Walter Benjamin and the 'angel of history' 21

Michel Foucault and the panoptican 24

Laura Mulvey, female stars and 'to-be-looked-at-ness' 26

Mikhail Bakhtin: the carnivalesque and the grotesque 27

Postmodernism: intertextuality, bricolage and metafiction 31

Magical realism 34

Masquerade and the performative 37

2 Critical history 41

Gender, feminism and the carnivalesque 46

Performance and masquerade 50

Freakery and the grotesque 52

History and politics 56

Postmodernism and history 58

Genre: picaresque, magic realism and Gothic 63

3 Critical readings 67

'Metafiction, Magical Realism and Myth' / Heather Johnson 69

'Performance, Identity and the Body' / Sarah Sceats 82

'Postmodernism' / Jeannette Baxter 95

'Popular Culture, Carnival and Clowns' / Helen Stoddart 108.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 125-131) and index.

Includes web resources.

ISBN:

0415350115

9780415350112

0415350123

9780415350129

0203312074

9780203312070

OCLC:

76925262