Ben Masters
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198766148
- eISBN:
- 9780191820731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198766148.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
This chapter traces the fraught relationship between curiosity and explication in Carter’s major novels, and demonstrates how Carter’s experiments with grammatical modalities and syntax create a ...
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This chapter traces the fraught relationship between curiosity and explication in Carter’s major novels, and demonstrates how Carter’s experiments with grammatical modalities and syntax create a stylistically embodied curiosity that is responsive to uncertainty and contingency. It goes on to delineate an ethics of extrapolation, as enacted by Carter’s prose style, that draws us into a new kind of perception, and argues that this is fundamentally linked to what Carter called her ‘committed materialism’. Drawing on the work of thinkers and writers as diverse as Elaine Scarry, A.C. Bradley, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Alex Houen, and William Burroughs, this chapter recovers Carter’s artistry (too often overlooked), to show how her ethics and politics are achieved first and foremost through the particulars of her extravagant prose style.Less
This chapter traces the fraught relationship between curiosity and explication in Carter’s major novels, and demonstrates how Carter’s experiments with grammatical modalities and syntax create a stylistically embodied curiosity that is responsive to uncertainty and contingency. It goes on to delineate an ethics of extrapolation, as enacted by Carter’s prose style, that draws us into a new kind of perception, and argues that this is fundamentally linked to what Carter called her ‘committed materialism’. Drawing on the work of thinkers and writers as diverse as Elaine Scarry, A.C. Bradley, Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Alex Houen, and William Burroughs, this chapter recovers Carter’s artistry (too often overlooked), to show how her ethics and politics are achieved first and foremost through the particulars of her extravagant prose style.
Terence Cave
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199604807
- eISBN:
- 9780191731624
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604807.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Mignon’s fortunes in the twentieth century are explored in this chapter primarily through works in which she passes over the threshold of sexual maturity and encounters exploitation and corruption, ...
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Mignon’s fortunes in the twentieth century are explored in this chapter primarily through works in which she passes over the threshold of sexual maturity and encounters exploitation and corruption, e.g. Wedekind’s Lulu plays (and Berg’s opera), Gerhart Hauptmann’s novella Mignon, and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: the fall of Lulu and the short-lived ‘rescue’ of Aga-Mignon by Hauptmann’s unreliable narrator are counterbalanced by a more positive denouement in Carter’s magic realist plot. This chapter also discusses an allusion to Thomas’s opera in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and the interest of Maria Kaschnitz for Mignon, whom she turns in an early novel into a figure of eternal return. Films featuring Mignon (including Wim Wenders’s Falsche Bewegung) are reviewed, and the chapter ends with an American novel (by Kim Chernin) of the dawning twenty-first century in which Mignon appears as an object of homoerotic desire.Less
Mignon’s fortunes in the twentieth century are explored in this chapter primarily through works in which she passes over the threshold of sexual maturity and encounters exploitation and corruption, e.g. Wedekind’s Lulu plays (and Berg’s opera), Gerhart Hauptmann’s novella Mignon, and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: the fall of Lulu and the short-lived ‘rescue’ of Aga-Mignon by Hauptmann’s unreliable narrator are counterbalanced by a more positive denouement in Carter’s magic realist plot. This chapter also discusses an allusion to Thomas’s opera in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and the interest of Maria Kaschnitz for Mignon, whom she turns in an early novel into a figure of eternal return. Films featuring Mignon (including Wim Wenders’s Falsche Bewegung) are reviewed, and the chapter ends with an American novel (by Kim Chernin) of the dawning twenty-first century in which Mignon appears as an object of homoerotic desire.
Willem de Blécourt
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089343
- eISBN:
- 9781781708743
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089343.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The motif of the werewolf’s severed paw occurs in a variety of texts of different periods. In contemporary popular culture, it is probably most familiar from Angela Carter’s fiction and Neil Jordan’s ...
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The motif of the werewolf’s severed paw occurs in a variety of texts of different periods. In contemporary popular culture, it is probably most familiar from Angela Carter’s fiction and Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves (based on Carter’s short stories). That this motif specifically concerns the paw/hand transformation, as well as a female werewolf, is suggestive. In medieval European literary traditions, women’s cut-off hands symbolized their role as victims of incest. Moreover, in medieval religious and literary texts, incest was seen as something nonhuman and, in some cases, specifically pertaining to wolves. This chapter will argue that the metamorphosis associated with the severed paw motif thus contains a double incest metaphor, which was later obscured in popular culture and, eventually, lost through the switch in gender of the amputee (as seen in The Company of Wolves).Less
The motif of the werewolf’s severed paw occurs in a variety of texts of different periods. In contemporary popular culture, it is probably most familiar from Angela Carter’s fiction and Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves (based on Carter’s short stories). That this motif specifically concerns the paw/hand transformation, as well as a female werewolf, is suggestive. In medieval European literary traditions, women’s cut-off hands symbolized their role as victims of incest. Moreover, in medieval religious and literary texts, incest was seen as something nonhuman and, in some cases, specifically pertaining to wolves. This chapter will argue that the metamorphosis associated with the severed paw motif thus contains a double incest metaphor, which was later obscured in popular culture and, eventually, lost through the switch in gender of the amputee (as seen in The Company of Wolves).
James Gracey
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781911325314
- eISBN:
- 9781800342262
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781911325314.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter looks into the heart of Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as a story of sexual awakening, literal and figurative formation, and the empowerment of women. It discusses how The Company ...
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This chapter looks into the heart of Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as a story of sexual awakening, literal and figurative formation, and the empowerment of women. It discusses how The Company of Wolves carries a strong feminist message that is more than a singular concept, like the short stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. It also explains Carter's brand of feminism that represents one strand that was often at odds with those of other feminists at the time and even considered highly controversial. The chapter analyses how Carter sought to expose how women's sexuality is perceived as a myth instigated and perpetuated by moral and social conditioning. It discloses Carter's frequent visit to the world of fairy tales to critique culturally constructed notions relating to women, gender roles and femininity.Less
This chapter looks into the heart of Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as a story of sexual awakening, literal and figurative formation, and the empowerment of women. It discusses how The Company of Wolves carries a strong feminist message that is more than a singular concept, like the short stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. It also explains Carter's brand of feminism that represents one strand that was often at odds with those of other feminists at the time and even considered highly controversial. The chapter analyses how Carter sought to expose how women's sexuality is perceived as a myth instigated and perpetuated by moral and social conditioning. It discloses Carter's frequent visit to the world of fairy tales to critique culturally constructed notions relating to women, gender roles and femininity.
James Gracey
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781911325314
- eISBN:
- 9781800342262
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781911325314.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Co-written by Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan and British novelist Angela Carter, and based on several short stories from Carter's collection The Bloody Chamber, The Company of Wolves (1984) is a ...
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Co-written by Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan and British novelist Angela Carter, and based on several short stories from Carter's collection The Bloody Chamber, The Company of Wolves (1984) is a provocative reinvention of the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Unraveling a feverish metaphor for the blossoming of a young girl's sexuality and her subsequent loss of innocence, the film entwines symbolism and metaphor with striking visuals and grisly effects. Released in the early 1980s, a time which produced several classic werewolf films (including An American Werewolf in London and The Howling), The Company of Wolves sets itself apart from the pack with its overtly literary roots, feminist stance, and art-house leanings. The film's narrative takes the form of a puzzle box, unfolding as dreams within dreams, and stories within stories, which lead further into the dark woods of the protagonist's psyche, as she finds herself on the cusp of womanhood. The book explores all these aspects, as well as placing the film in the context of the careers of its creators and its position as an example of the “Female Gothic.”Less
Co-written by Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan and British novelist Angela Carter, and based on several short stories from Carter's collection The Bloody Chamber, The Company of Wolves (1984) is a provocative reinvention of the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Unraveling a feverish metaphor for the blossoming of a young girl's sexuality and her subsequent loss of innocence, the film entwines symbolism and metaphor with striking visuals and grisly effects. Released in the early 1980s, a time which produced several classic werewolf films (including An American Werewolf in London and The Howling), The Company of Wolves sets itself apart from the pack with its overtly literary roots, feminist stance, and art-house leanings. The film's narrative takes the form of a puzzle box, unfolding as dreams within dreams, and stories within stories, which lead further into the dark woods of the protagonist's psyche, as she finds herself on the cusp of womanhood. The book explores all these aspects, as well as placing the film in the context of the careers of its creators and its position as an example of the “Female Gothic.”
Judith Still
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748680979
- eISBN:
- 9781474412469
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748680979.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 explores above all the political philosophical figure of the animal, and, while sexual difference is repeatedly evoked, little sustained attention is ...
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Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 explores above all the political philosophical figure of the animal, and, while sexual difference is repeatedly evoked, little sustained attention is paid to women writers or to the ramifications of woman occupying the place of the animal in a hierarchy with man. This chapter starts with Derrida’s intertexts for the figure of the wolf in a domestic context: Plautus (Asinaria), Montaigne and Rousseau’s Confessions. It then supplements these by focusing on writing of the twentieth century by Cixous, Vivien (The Lady with the She-Wolf), Duffy (The World’s Wife) and Carter (The Bloody Chamber) which evokes the love of the wolf as both desirable and frightening. Tsvetaeva’s writing comes in as an intertext in Cixous’s ‘Love of the Wolf’, in particular her long poem ‘Le Gars’ and her essays on Pushkin. Fairy tales, notably Red Riding Hood, are also key intertexts. The chapter also returns to Derrida’s analysis of Deleuze and Lacan in their specification of the animal against man.Less
Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 explores above all the political philosophical figure of the animal, and, while sexual difference is repeatedly evoked, little sustained attention is paid to women writers or to the ramifications of woman occupying the place of the animal in a hierarchy with man. This chapter starts with Derrida’s intertexts for the figure of the wolf in a domestic context: Plautus (Asinaria), Montaigne and Rousseau’s Confessions. It then supplements these by focusing on writing of the twentieth century by Cixous, Vivien (The Lady with the She-Wolf), Duffy (The World’s Wife) and Carter (The Bloody Chamber) which evokes the love of the wolf as both desirable and frightening. Tsvetaeva’s writing comes in as an intertext in Cixous’s ‘Love of the Wolf’, in particular her long poem ‘Le Gars’ and her essays on Pushkin. Fairy tales, notably Red Riding Hood, are also key intertexts. The chapter also returns to Derrida’s analysis of Deleuze and Lacan in their specification of the animal against man.
Michael Wood
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198707868
- eISBN:
- 9780191779008
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This chapter explores the revival of various forms of the essay in fiction written in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro ...
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This chapter explores the revival of various forms of the essay in fiction written in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro are shown to integrate speculation and reflection into experimental narratives that open up spaces for these notionally old-fashioned strangers. Under the disguised and perhaps indirectly borrowed aegis of Jorge Luis Borges, these writers ask questions about time, history, laughter, invention, and much else. Dark fantasy in Carter, unreliable knowledge in Barnes, trauma in Sebald, memory and forgetting in Ishiguro all give rise to stories that think, and thinking that can’t do without stories.Less
This chapter explores the revival of various forms of the essay in fiction written in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro are shown to integrate speculation and reflection into experimental narratives that open up spaces for these notionally old-fashioned strangers. Under the disguised and perhaps indirectly borrowed aegis of Jorge Luis Borges, these writers ask questions about time, history, laughter, invention, and much else. Dark fantasy in Carter, unreliable knowledge in Barnes, trauma in Sebald, memory and forgetting in Ishiguro all give rise to stories that think, and thinking that can’t do without stories.
Monika Fludernik
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198840909
- eISBN:
- 9780191879906
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198840909.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 8 introduces the prison amoureuse topos featuring the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The chapter opens with a reading of Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an ...
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Chapter 8 introduces the prison amoureuse topos featuring the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The chapter opens with a reading of Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an instance of a juxtaposition of literal and metaphorical imprisonment. The following section introduces the medieval prison amoureuse trope (Boethius, Froissart, Diego de San Pedro, Charles d’Orléans, James I), and its Renaissance repercussions in the work of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Lovelace. This leads on to a consideration of masochism and bondage, with Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an illustrative example. John Dryden’s play All for Love with its opposition of love and duty as bondage concludes the chapter.Less
Chapter 8 introduces the prison amoureuse topos featuring the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The chapter opens with a reading of Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an instance of a juxtaposition of literal and metaphorical imprisonment. The following section introduces the medieval prison amoureuse trope (Boethius, Froissart, Diego de San Pedro, Charles d’Orléans, James I), and its Renaissance repercussions in the work of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Lovelace. This leads on to a consideration of masochism and bondage, with Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an illustrative example. John Dryden’s play All for Love with its opposition of love and duty as bondage concludes the chapter.
Casie E. Hermansson
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604732306
- eISBN:
- 9781604733532
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604732306.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Folk Literature
Different versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale “Bluebeard” proliferated throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. From Max Frisch’s novel Bluebeard: A Tale (1982) to Charles ...
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Different versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale “Bluebeard” proliferated throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. From Max Frisch’s novel Bluebeard: A Tale (1982) to Charles Ludlam’s avant-garde play Bluebeard (1987) and Donald Barthelme’s story “Bluebeard” (1987), these referential texts are simultaneous with one another and foreground the reader’s own complicity and processes in reading intertextually. This chapter examines contemporary forms of “Bluebeard” in the Anglophone tradition and how they actualize self-reflexivity to explore various crises of artistic representation. These works include Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard (1987), Edward Dmytryk’s film Bluebeard (1972), Cindy Sherman’s book Fitcher’s Bird (1992), the Mills and Boon/Harlequin romance Bluebeard’s Bride (1985), and Celia Fremlin’s story “Bluebeard’s Key” (1985). The chapter also analyzes the films The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Piano (1993), along with the works of the contemporary women writers Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.Less
Different versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale “Bluebeard” proliferated throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. From Max Frisch’s novel Bluebeard: A Tale (1982) to Charles Ludlam’s avant-garde play Bluebeard (1987) and Donald Barthelme’s story “Bluebeard” (1987), these referential texts are simultaneous with one another and foreground the reader’s own complicity and processes in reading intertextually. This chapter examines contemporary forms of “Bluebeard” in the Anglophone tradition and how they actualize self-reflexivity to explore various crises of artistic representation. These works include Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard (1987), Edward Dmytryk’s film Bluebeard (1972), Cindy Sherman’s book Fitcher’s Bird (1992), the Mills and Boon/Harlequin romance Bluebeard’s Bride (1985), and Celia Fremlin’s story “Bluebeard’s Key” (1985). The chapter also analyzes the films The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Piano (1993), along with the works of the contemporary women writers Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.
James Gracey
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781911325314
- eISBN:
- 9781800342262
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781911325314.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter focuses on The Company of Wolves, as a dark fantasy film about the horrors of the adult world and of adult sexuality glimpsed through the dreams of an adolescent girl. It analyses how ...
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This chapter focuses on The Company of Wolves, as a dark fantasy film about the horrors of the adult world and of adult sexuality glimpsed through the dreams of an adolescent girl. It analyses how The Company of Wolves amalgamates aspects of horror, the Female Gothic, fairy tales, werewolf films and coming-of-age parables. It also illustrates how The Company of Wolves is drenched in atmosphere and an eerily sensual malaise that boasts striking imagery immersed in fairy-tale motifs and startling Freudian symbolism. The chapter mentions Neil Jordan as the director of The Company of Wolves, his second film and his first foray into the realms of Gothic horror. It cites several short stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber from 1979 as the basis for The Company of Wolves.Less
This chapter focuses on The Company of Wolves, as a dark fantasy film about the horrors of the adult world and of adult sexuality glimpsed through the dreams of an adolescent girl. It analyses how The Company of Wolves amalgamates aspects of horror, the Female Gothic, fairy tales, werewolf films and coming-of-age parables. It also illustrates how The Company of Wolves is drenched in atmosphere and an eerily sensual malaise that boasts striking imagery immersed in fairy-tale motifs and startling Freudian symbolism. The chapter mentions Neil Jordan as the director of The Company of Wolves, his second film and his first foray into the realms of Gothic horror. It cites several short stories from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber from 1979 as the basis for The Company of Wolves.
James Gracey
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781911325314
- eISBN:
- 9781800342262
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781911325314.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter explains how werewolves have traditionally been a masculinised beast associated with cultural concepts of masculinity. It explores Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as an atypical ...
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This chapter explains how werewolves have traditionally been a masculinised beast associated with cultural concepts of masculinity. It explores Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as an atypical werewolf film that uses the figure of the lycanthrope to explore notions of adult sexuality from a distinctly feminine vantage point. It also mentions Angela Carter, who described The Company of Wolves as a menstrual film in which the wolves stand for the girl's own sexuality, rather than rough, hairy male sexuality. The chapter discusses female werewolves that have been used as the vehicle to discuss various 'human' anxieties for many centuries. It looks at Rosaleen's encounter and seduction of the huntsman as a significant and influential moment in the history of horror cinema that challenges the traditional representation of the werewolf that is inherently masculine.Less
This chapter explains how werewolves have traditionally been a masculinised beast associated with cultural concepts of masculinity. It explores Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves as an atypical werewolf film that uses the figure of the lycanthrope to explore notions of adult sexuality from a distinctly feminine vantage point. It also mentions Angela Carter, who described The Company of Wolves as a menstrual film in which the wolves stand for the girl's own sexuality, rather than rough, hairy male sexuality. The chapter discusses female werewolves that have been used as the vehicle to discuss various 'human' anxieties for many centuries. It looks at Rosaleen's encounter and seduction of the huntsman as a significant and influential moment in the history of horror cinema that challenges the traditional representation of the werewolf that is inherently masculine.
Monika Fludernik
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198840909
- eISBN:
- 9780191879906
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198840909.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 9 focuses on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprisonment and its reflection in one literary example ...
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Chapter 9 focuses on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprisonment and its reflection in one literary example (Alice Walker’s The Color Purple). This is followed by a discussion of the panopticon metaphor in Angela Carter and Sarah Waters, analysing these authors’ feminist and lesbian takes on Foucault. A third section concentrates on domesticity and the body in so far as they are perceived as metaphorically confining, contrasting Susan Glaspell’s Trifles with Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. A final section returns to Emily Dickinson and Glaspell, focusing on the predicament of the woman writer; it notes how the female artist can escape from the straitjacket of feminine decorum only by ending up in the role of another gynophobic stereotype: that of the hysteric or the madwoman.Less
Chapter 9 focuses on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprisonment and its reflection in one literary example (Alice Walker’s The Color Purple). This is followed by a discussion of the panopticon metaphor in Angela Carter and Sarah Waters, analysing these authors’ feminist and lesbian takes on Foucault. A third section concentrates on domesticity and the body in so far as they are perceived as metaphorically confining, contrasting Susan Glaspell’s Trifles with Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. A final section returns to Emily Dickinson and Glaspell, focusing on the predicament of the woman writer; it notes how the female artist can escape from the straitjacket of feminine decorum only by ending up in the role of another gynophobic stereotype: that of the hysteric or the madwoman.
Gina Wisker
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748699124
- eISBN:
- 9781474422253
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748699124.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter examines how fictional vampires problematise received notions of women’s passivity, ‘natural’ nurturing skills and social conformity, suggesting that female vampires destabilise such ...
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This chapter examines how fictional vampires problematise received notions of women’s passivity, ‘natural’ nurturing skills and social conformity, suggesting that female vampires destabilise such comfortable, culturally inflected investments. Performativity, abjection and carnival lie at the heart of their construction and representation so there is a constant tension between punishment and celebration of their transgressive nature. Ranging across a number of nineteenth-century texts, it is suggested that they can be read as indicating gaps and fissures in social certainties and as nightmares emanating from the zones of patriarchy. In the twentieth century powerful female vampires may be found in the fiction of Angela Carter, who provide templates for later authors. In these later texts and in various lesbian vampire fictions, vampires become liberating, feminist figures: sexually transgressive, they undermine received certainties of identity, family, and hierarchy based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity. But they can also represent the energy of social activism as in Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two recent dramatic works by Ana Lily Amirpour and Moira Buffini, in which vampires are shown as becoming angels of mercy and women become self-sufficient, despite poverty and vulnerability.Less
This chapter examines how fictional vampires problematise received notions of women’s passivity, ‘natural’ nurturing skills and social conformity, suggesting that female vampires destabilise such comfortable, culturally inflected investments. Performativity, abjection and carnival lie at the heart of their construction and representation so there is a constant tension between punishment and celebration of their transgressive nature. Ranging across a number of nineteenth-century texts, it is suggested that they can be read as indicating gaps and fissures in social certainties and as nightmares emanating from the zones of patriarchy. In the twentieth century powerful female vampires may be found in the fiction of Angela Carter, who provide templates for later authors. In these later texts and in various lesbian vampire fictions, vampires become liberating, feminist figures: sexually transgressive, they undermine received certainties of identity, family, and hierarchy based on gender, sexuality and ethnicity. But they can also represent the energy of social activism as in Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two recent dramatic works by Ana Lily Amirpour and Moira Buffini, in which vampires are shown as becoming angels of mercy and women become self-sufficient, despite poverty and vulnerability.
Ben Masters
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198766148
- eISBN:
- 9780191820731
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198766148.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a ...
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Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a fresh style of ethical criticism that does not over-rely on notions of character and interiority (the terrain of the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the approach of the ‘new ethics’, with its indebtedness to poststructuralism), Novel Style defends the stylistic excesses of writers who were conscious of both writing out of excessive times and of the need for new kinds of artistic response to contemporary ethical pressures. Through its methodology, Novel Style calls for a return to close reading and aesthetic evaluation and recovers its subjects from theoretical quagmires by repositioning them as stylists and ethicists, arguing that the two positions are inextricable. For example, it considers how forms of stylistic excess—ranging from puns and wordplay to long sentences, proliferating imagery, repetitions, idiosyncratic rhythms, multiple levels of narration, and variable points of view—might enact ethically-charged dynamics like curiosity, particularity, complexity, and empathy. As well as being an impassioned defence of literary excess, flamboyance, and close reading, Novel Style asks fundamental questions about how novels think, see, and feel, and how they might change us.Less
Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a fresh style of ethical criticism that does not over-rely on notions of character and interiority (the terrain of the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the approach of the ‘new ethics’, with its indebtedness to poststructuralism), Novel Style defends the stylistic excesses of writers who were conscious of both writing out of excessive times and of the need for new kinds of artistic response to contemporary ethical pressures. Through its methodology, Novel Style calls for a return to close reading and aesthetic evaluation and recovers its subjects from theoretical quagmires by repositioning them as stylists and ethicists, arguing that the two positions are inextricable. For example, it considers how forms of stylistic excess—ranging from puns and wordplay to long sentences, proliferating imagery, repetitions, idiosyncratic rhythms, multiple levels of narration, and variable points of view—might enact ethically-charged dynamics like curiosity, particularity, complexity, and empathy. As well as being an impassioned defence of literary excess, flamboyance, and close reading, Novel Style asks fundamental questions about how novels think, see, and feel, and how they might change us.
Hilary M. Schor
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199928095
- eISBN:
- 9780199980550
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199928095.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter goes back to Paradise Lost and Eve in the garden, drawing on the nature of the “test” in the history of the English courtship novel, from Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen to Charlotte ...
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This chapter goes back to Paradise Lost and Eve in the garden, drawing on the nature of the “test” in the history of the English courtship novel, from Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen to Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. At the heart of this chapter is a reading of the Marquis de Sade, Angela Carter, and being struck by lightning, the powerful and ironic version of enlightenment available for the heroine. The chapter focuses on the fascinating delay, the space of curiosity, between the proposition and the contract—the trial that is the heart of the realist novel and that makes possible (or not) the eventual marriage. Realism is itself a contract: a contract into which the reader enters, a contract that provides belief. This corresponds to formal philosophical ways of knowing, particularly through probability and problems of “credit,” what has been called the antimony of fictional knowledge.Less
This chapter goes back to Paradise Lost and Eve in the garden, drawing on the nature of the “test” in the history of the English courtship novel, from Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen to Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. At the heart of this chapter is a reading of the Marquis de Sade, Angela Carter, and being struck by lightning, the powerful and ironic version of enlightenment available for the heroine. The chapter focuses on the fascinating delay, the space of curiosity, between the proposition and the contract—the trial that is the heart of the realist novel and that makes possible (or not) the eventual marriage. Realism is itself a contract: a contract into which the reader enters, a contract that provides belief. This corresponds to formal philosophical ways of knowing, particularly through probability and problems of “credit,” what has been called the antimony of fictional knowledge.
Ben Masters
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198766148
- eISBN:
- 9780191820731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198766148.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that ...
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This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that excess enacts its own peculiar and ethically enriching powers of thought and perception that cannot be so fully activated in a plainer style. To evidence this, it offers quick readings of Burgess, Carter, and Amis’s plainest books, showing how the ethical power of their characteristic styles is muted when the excess is tamed. Excess is shown to be both the product and regulator of the intellectual and political divisions that animate their thinking (especially between the conservative and the transformative), and the key to how their texts affect and engage the reader.Less
This final chapter considers how far the broader arguments made about style in the previous chapters could be applied to other economies of novelistic prose (e.g. minimalism), before arguing that excess enacts its own peculiar and ethically enriching powers of thought and perception that cannot be so fully activated in a plainer style. To evidence this, it offers quick readings of Burgess, Carter, and Amis’s plainest books, showing how the ethical power of their characteristic styles is muted when the excess is tamed. Excess is shown to be both the product and regulator of the intellectual and political divisions that animate their thinking (especially between the conservative and the transformative), and the key to how their texts affect and engage the reader.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846318344
- eISBN:
- 9781846317798
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317798.017
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Metafiction refers to fiction that is aware of its own fictionality. Coined in 1970 by the critic and novelist William Gass, metafiction took to extremes the tension between realism and the real in ...
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Metafiction refers to fiction that is aware of its own fictionality. Coined in 1970 by the critic and novelist William Gass, metafiction took to extremes the tension between realism and the real in the nineteenth-century novel. Examples of metafiction within the science fiction genre include Philip K. Dick's post-1974 novels such as Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) and Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975). The strategies of metafiction and the undecidability between fiction and reality were symptomatic of postmodernism, whose definition also proved problematic. This chapter focuses on postmodern science fiction writers such as Richard Cowper, Christopher Priest, Robert Sheckley, Barry Malzberg, Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip José Farmer, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Shea, Kingsley Amis, Angela Carter, Emma Tennant, John Sladek and Frederik Pohl. It also examines the television programme Welt am Draht (World on a Wire/World on Wires and cyberpunk.Less
Metafiction refers to fiction that is aware of its own fictionality. Coined in 1970 by the critic and novelist William Gass, metafiction took to extremes the tension between realism and the real in the nineteenth-century novel. Examples of metafiction within the science fiction genre include Philip K. Dick's post-1974 novels such as Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) and Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975). The strategies of metafiction and the undecidability between fiction and reality were symptomatic of postmodernism, whose definition also proved problematic. This chapter focuses on postmodern science fiction writers such as Richard Cowper, Christopher Priest, Robert Sheckley, Barry Malzberg, Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip José Farmer, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Shea, Kingsley Amis, Angela Carter, Emma Tennant, John Sladek and Frederik Pohl. It also examines the television programme Welt am Draht (World on a Wire/World on Wires and cyberpunk.