Angela Carter's Pyrotechnics
A Union of Contraries
Published on 10. February 2022
Book
Hardback
280 pages
978-1-350-18272-1 (ISBN)
Description
Representing a shift in Carter studies for the 21st century, this book critically explores her legacy and showcases the current state of Angela Carter scholarship. It gives new insights into Carter's pyrotechnic creativity and pays tribute to her incendiary imagination in a reappraisal of Angela Carter's work, her influences and influence. Drawing attention to the highly constructed artifice of Angela Carter's work, it brings to the fore her lesser-known collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces to reposition her as more than just the author of The Bloody Chamber. On the way, it also explores the impact of her experiences living in Japan, in the light of Edmund Gordon's 2016 biography and Natsumi Ikoma's translation of Sozo Araki's Japanese memoirs of Carter.
Reviews / Votes
The essays are uniformly serious, well researched, clearly written, and impressively innovative. Including 15 illustrations, this book is for those interested in feminism, fairy tales, and, of course, literary theory and women writers. * CHOICE * Discussing a wide range of Carter's fiction, this book explores how cross-cultural semiotics, musicality, visual critique, and sensory materiality animate Carter's pyrotechnic prose. Along with new perspectives on familiar topics, it features exciting studies of folksong, opera, food, and fashion as they inform the poetics of specific Carterian works. * Cristina Bacchilega, Professor Emerita of English, University of Hawai'i-Manoa, USA * These essays multiply Carter's creative bursts of "flower fire," spreading out from a core of key scholars in a rigorous, yet also powerfully intuitive lighting up of new inroads into her conceptually elusive aesthetics. * Contemporary Women's Writing * This truly pyrotechnic book brings together various qualities of Angela Carter's fiction, exploring its musicality, materiality, performativity, and its visual aspects in a firework-like explosion, and showcasing the intricate web of references, influences and intertexts hidden in her fiction. Assembling chapters by scholars of different disciplines from all over the world, this collection provides new and insightful ways of reading Carter that will undoubtedly interest both her longtime fans and readers who have only just discovered her. * Gramarye * [T]his collection is an excellent addition to Carter scholarship, offering both rich readings of individual works and initiating exciting new directions for future research. * Modern Language Review *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Weight
567 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-350-18272-1 (9781350182721)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Charlotte Crofts is Associate Professor of Filmmaking at the University of the West of England, UK. She is editor-in-chief of Screenworks (2006-present). She has published a monograph on Angela Carter, Anagrams of Desire: Angela Carter's Writing for Radio, Film and Television (MUP, 2003), a chapter 'Curiously Downbeat Hybrid or Radical Retelling?: Neil Jordan's and Angela Carter's 'The Company of Wolves'' in Sisterhoods: Across the Literature/Media Divide (Pluto Press, 1999) and written about her Japanese writings in ''The Other of the Other': Angela Carter's 'New-Fangled' Orientalism' in Re-Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, ed. Rebecca Munford (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). She is currently developing a feature-film adaptation of Angela Carter's Japanese writings. She co-founded the Angela Carter Society with Caleb Sivyer, and Marie Mulvey-Roberts with whom she is developing a Smart phone app on Carter.
Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, UK. She is the author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (MUP, 2016), winner of the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. She has authored, edited and co-edited over 30 books. This will be her third edited book on Angela Carter. Recently she made a film on Carter's The Bloody Chamber for Massolit, for use in schools (33,000 downloads). She was the co-curator of the Strange Worlds exhibition on Angela Carter at the Royal West Academy of Art in Bristol 2017 and co-edited the catalogue. She is the co-founder of Women's Writing, for which she serves as Editor and runs two Carter websites with Charlotte Crofts.
Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, UK. She is the author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (MUP, 2016), winner of the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. She has authored, edited and co-edited over 30 books. This will be her third edited book on Angela Carter. Recently she made a film on Carter's The Bloody Chamber for Massolit, for use in schools (33,000 downloads). She was the co-curator of the Strange Worlds exhibition on Angela Carter at the Royal West Academy of Art in Bristol 2017 and co-edited the catalogue. She is the co-founder of Women's Writing, for which she serves as Editor and runs two Carter websites with Charlotte Crofts.
Content
Foreword
Gina Wisker (University of Brighton, UK)
Pyrotechnics: Angela Carter's Incendiary Imagination
Charlotte Crofts (UWE Bristol, UK) & and Marie Mulvey-Roberts (UWE Bristol, UK)
SIGNS & OBJECTS
1. Carter and the Japanese Signs: Bunraku, Mishima, Irezumi and Sozo Araki
Natsumi Ikoma (International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan)
2. Some Kinds of Love: Angela Carter, Art and Objects
David Punter (University of Bristol, UK)
3. The Chance Encounter of a Stuffed Dodo, a Fallen Star, and a Fruit Woman Automaton... The Secret Life of Things Queering the Museal Gaze in Angela Carter's Curiosity Cabinets
Anna Kerchy (University of Szeged, Hungary)
MUSIC, PERFORMANCE & FAIRYTALE
4. 'Down to the Greenwood': Angela Carter and Traditional Folksong
Hippolyta C. M. Paulusma (University of Cambridge, UK)
5. From Grizelda's Patience to Feminist Grit: Angela Carter's 'The Patience of Grizelda' as a Hidden Intertext to 'The Bloody Chamber'
Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
6. Of Tales, Tragic Opera, Transformation and 'Tongues': Tristan und Isolde in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber
Ashley Riggs (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
7. Theatre, Adaptation, Angela Carter: A Case Study
Belinda Locke (PhD Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia 2018; Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, Victoria Australia)
WAYS OF SEEING
8. 'What Then?' Apocalypticism and Angela Carter's Surrealist Aesthetics
Scott A Dimovitz (Regis University, Denver, USA)
9. Kaleidoscopes, Stereoscopes and Phantasmagoria: Critical and Creative Ways of Seeing in the Work of Angela Carter
Caleb Sivyer (UWE Bristol, UK)
10. 'The Strangeness of the World Made Visible': Reading Alignments between Angela Carter and Paula Rego
Beatrice Bijon (Australian National University, Canberra Australia)
MATERIAL BODIES
11. Perceiving Pleasures and Appetites in The Bloody Chamber: 'Surprise me for dessert with every ice-cream in the ice box' Maria Jose Pires (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, Portugal)
12. The Skin that Holds You In: States of Dress and Undress in Angela Carter's Animal/Human Transformation Stories
Carys Crossen (University of Manchester, UK)
13. Angela Carter's Questioning of 'Age-appropriate' Appearance and Behaviour in Wise Children
Zoe Brennan (UWE Bristol, UK)
Gina Wisker (University of Brighton, UK)
Pyrotechnics: Angela Carter's Incendiary Imagination
Charlotte Crofts (UWE Bristol, UK) & and Marie Mulvey-Roberts (UWE Bristol, UK)
SIGNS & OBJECTS
1. Carter and the Japanese Signs: Bunraku, Mishima, Irezumi and Sozo Araki
Natsumi Ikoma (International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan)
2. Some Kinds of Love: Angela Carter, Art and Objects
David Punter (University of Bristol, UK)
3. The Chance Encounter of a Stuffed Dodo, a Fallen Star, and a Fruit Woman Automaton... The Secret Life of Things Queering the Museal Gaze in Angela Carter's Curiosity Cabinets
Anna Kerchy (University of Szeged, Hungary)
MUSIC, PERFORMANCE & FAIRYTALE
4. 'Down to the Greenwood': Angela Carter and Traditional Folksong
Hippolyta C. M. Paulusma (University of Cambridge, UK)
5. From Grizelda's Patience to Feminist Grit: Angela Carter's 'The Patience of Grizelda' as a Hidden Intertext to 'The Bloody Chamber'
Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
6. Of Tales, Tragic Opera, Transformation and 'Tongues': Tristan und Isolde in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber
Ashley Riggs (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
7. Theatre, Adaptation, Angela Carter: A Case Study
Belinda Locke (PhD Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia 2018; Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, Victoria Australia)
WAYS OF SEEING
8. 'What Then?' Apocalypticism and Angela Carter's Surrealist Aesthetics
Scott A Dimovitz (Regis University, Denver, USA)
9. Kaleidoscopes, Stereoscopes and Phantasmagoria: Critical and Creative Ways of Seeing in the Work of Angela Carter
Caleb Sivyer (UWE Bristol, UK)
10. 'The Strangeness of the World Made Visible': Reading Alignments between Angela Carter and Paula Rego
Beatrice Bijon (Australian National University, Canberra Australia)
MATERIAL BODIES
11. Perceiving Pleasures and Appetites in The Bloody Chamber: 'Surprise me for dessert with every ice-cream in the ice box' Maria Jose Pires (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, Portugal)
12. The Skin that Holds You In: States of Dress and Undress in Angela Carter's Animal/Human Transformation Stories
Carys Crossen (University of Manchester, UK)
13. Angela Carter's Questioning of 'Age-appropriate' Appearance and Behaviour in Wise Children
Zoe Brennan (UWE Bristol, UK)