Angela carters nights at the circus 8

Contents

Notes and references

ix

Introduction

xi

1: Text and contexts

1

Angela Carter: biography and writing
Academic contexts
Internationalism
Recognition
Britain in the 1890s and the 1980s: Margaret Thatcher
Britain in the 1960s: cultural change
Literary contexts and beyond
Critical contexts

3
4
5
6
8
10
12
21

Walter Benjamin and the ‘angel of history’
Michel Foucault and the panoptican
Laura Mulvey, female stars and ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’
Mikhail Bakhtin: the carnivalesque and the grotesque
Postmodernism: intertextuality, bricolage and metafiction
Magical realism
Masquerade and the performative

2: Critical history
Reviews
Gender, feminism and the carnivalesque
Performance and masquerade
Freakery and the grotesque
History and politics
Postmodernism and history
Genre: picaresque, magic realism and Gothic

21
24
26
27
31
34
37

41
43
46
50

52
56
58
63