SOURCE: Pollock, Mary S. “Angela Carter's Animal Tales: Constructing the Non-Human.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 11, no. 1 (July 2000): 35-57.

In the following essay, Pollock discusses Carter's representation of animals in her works.

When she died in 1992, Angela Carter's close friend Salman Rushdie wrote that “English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witchqueen, a burlesque artist of genius and antic grace” (5). Carter disliked serious references to goddesses, sorcerers, and magic, and would have perhaps rejected the first two encomia, but she would have accepted the others.¹ Sometimes, she admitted ruefully that the “antic grace” of her stories threatened to obscure and muffle the hard core of meaning that was as important to her as the entertainment offered in stories; and she admired writers whose style did not distract from what they wanted to say—Christina Stead, for example, who taught herself to “compose […] like a blind man throwing...