SOURCE: “Supernatural Interactions, Eastern Ghosts, and Postmodern Narrative: Angela Carter's Fireworks,” in ARIEL, Vol. 30, No. 3, July, 1999, pp. 63-85.

In the following essay, Goh explores magic realism, feminism, and postmodernism in Angela Carter's short story collection Fireworks.

The work of deconstructing and dismantling “orientalist” discourses by such scholars as Edward Said and Chris Bongie reaches an impasse at the borders of the postmodern narrative. Said's key work, Orientalism, in the first place, is essentially a historiography concerned with “a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (3). This historiography encounters—and sets itself—certain limits in space and time: it is primarily interested in the “Franco-British involvement in the Orient,” particularly “from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II” (3, 4). Secondly, Said generally focuses on a relatively straightforward mode of discourse, what he calls “scholarship,” which from a poststructuralist point of...