Space, Mirrors, Subjectivity in Angela Carter’s Fiction

This book discusses the fictional works of Angela Carter, who is known for her daring, disturbing, excessive style, and her efforts to destroy every social norm. It explores Carter’s attempts to criticize, resist and rewrite hierarchical gendered discourse by analyzing it from the perspectives of confining space, specular space and bodily space.

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Angela Carter is known for her style—daring, disturbing, excessive—and her efforts to destroy and demystify every social norm. But she does more than dare. With sharp and subtle sensitivity, Carter disintegrates paradigms of temporality and mind enshrined by western philosophical tradition. She recognizes and illustrates how our modern alienation and disorientation derive more from spatial anxiety than time disorientation. Through her novels and short stories, Carter re-examines the human-space relation, unraveling the power discourses inscribed as the representation of space, and provides broader spatiotemporal imagination and possibilities. Focusing on spatiality in her works, this book explores Carter’s attempts to criticize, resist and rewrite hierarchical, gendered discourse—analyzing it through the lens of confining space, specular space and bodily space. I will show how Carter tries to build a new model of space that transcends the dominant/dominated paradigm and establishes a spatiality-subjectivity totality. Her model overcomes our state of alienation by embracing corporeality and excess, lived experience in everyday interactions with space, and a new construction of subject of becoming. This book is for literary critics, professors and students of literature, readers of Angela Carter, and all those who feel trapped by their bodies and space.