Angela Carter's short story "The Company of Wolves" is a subversive reimagining of the traditional "Little Red Riding Hood" fairy tale. Everyone who lives in the young girl's local village knows that the woods are to be feared. The girl, however, is unafraid, and boldly ventures out for her grandmother's. After encountering a charming huntsman, the girl is filled with curious desire. Later realizing the man plans to devour her, the girl must use her cunning and wiles to save herself. The narrative explores themes including the loss of innocence and sexual agency.
Study Pack
The The Company of Wolves: Short Story Study Pack contains:
Angela Carter's fiction poses precisely the question of what is central, what eccentric in contemporary British writing. "We live in Gothic times," she wrote in an afterword to her 1974 collection of ...
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During the inventive last ten years of her life—when she produced two of the most festive and disturbing novels of the last years of the century, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (19...
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Angela Carter's fantastic fiction is noteworthy for its stylistic excellence, its treatment of feminist themes, and its reliance on and reaction to motion-picture, fairy-tale, folklore, gothic, and sc...
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Angela (Olive) Carter