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Angela (Olive) Carter |
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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 tales, Fireworks; and all her work reflects that perception, in technique as well as in setting and subject. "Gothic" here is not used in the rather special American sense, but implies the European tradition that goes back to (at least) the eighteenth century (one of her recent books is a polemical rereading of the Marquis de Sade) and is a category that overlaps with other subgenres--romance, pornography, detective fiction, science fiction. To say "We live in Gothic times" is to suggest that the subgenres are now the appropriate and (paradoxically) central ones, since the times themselves are splintered and fraught with violent mythology. These assumptions--and the speculative, parodic style that stems from them--have made "placing" Angela Carter particularly difficult.
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