Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers interrogates the vexed question of Angela Carter’s feminist politics through the dusty lens of European Gothic. It illuminates her ambivalent relation to some of her most contentious European literary forebears, reveals her rich knowledge of French literature and offers fresh insights into her literary practices afforded by newly available archival material.
This book analyses Carter’s textual engagements with a dirty lineage of European Gothic that can be mapped from the Marquis de Sade’s obsession with desecration and defilement, through Baudelaire’s perverse decompositions of the muse and decadent imaginings of infernal femininity, to surrealism’s violent dreams of abjection. It argues that Carter’s most troublesome engagements with her European Gothic forefathers are unexpectedly those which are most vital to a consideration of her feminist politics. Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers will be of interest to researchers and students working on contemporary women’s writing, the Gothic and comparative literature.
Table of Content
Introduction: Angela Carter and European Gothic
1. Sleeping Beauty and the Sadeian Gothic
2. Poe, Baudelaire and the decomposing muse
3. Dolls, dreams and mad queens
4. Daddy’s girls and the Gothic fiction of maternity
Afterword: The Museum of dust
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Rebecca Munford is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
159,919 Ebooks in this category
