By the time of her death in 1992, Angela Carter had come to be regarded as one of the most successful and original British authors of the twentieth-century, and her writing has subsequently become the focus of a burgeoning body of criticism. This book disentangles the cult of Angela Carter as 'the fairy godmother of magical realism' from her own claims to be a materialist and a 'demythologiser' by placing her within the social, political and theoretical context within which she wrote. Drawing on Carter's own autobiographical articles as well as her novels and short stories, this study...

In this book Sarah Gamble explores Angela Carter's celebration of the marginal, the balance in her work between history and fantasy, fairy tale and reality, excessive desire and love and looks at how these tensions influenced both the form and content of her fiction. Providing close, perceptive readings of all of Carter's fiction, many of the short stories, as well as the non-fiction writing, Sarah Gamble demonstrates how, throughout her career, Carter wrote with the intention of subverting consensus views of any kind, in particular, the conception of history as unalterable 'master...

By the time of her death in 1992, Angela Carter had come to be regarded as one of the most successful and original British authors of the twentieth-century, and her writing has subsequently become the focus of a burgeoning body of criticism. This book disentangles the cult of Angela Carter as 'the fairy godmother of magical realism' from her own claims to be a materialist and a 'demythologiser' by placing her within the social, political and theoretical context within which she wrote. Drawing on Carter's own autobiographical articles as well as her novels and short stories, this study...