Nights at the Circus | Techniques

Nights at the Circus Techniques

Throughout her career, Carter constantly sought to speak the previously unspeakable, to express a broader range of experience than hitherto possible. The introductory passage to an interview by John Haffenden in Novelists in Interview (1985) begins as follows: The term 'magical realist' might well have been invented to describe Angela Carter, novelist, journalist, feminist. Her gift of outrageous fantastication, resourcefully drawing on folklore and fairy tale, enables her to conjure fabulous countries which have close designs upon the ways and means of real men and women, and upon the institutions that condition their responses and contests. Richly imagined and stylistically uninhibited—with dehumanizing villains, exotic landscapes and lush sensuality—her fictions are in many ways parables of power, desire and subjection.

Carter is the quintessential "ex-centric" author—writing subversively from the margin, displacing establishment discourses— and in Nights at the Circus, an overtly political and feminist work, she is confronting and...
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