Description
Book SynopsisBy reading key Carter texts alongside their Decadent intertexts, Tonkin interrogates the claim that Carter was in thrall to a fetishistic aesthetic antithetical to her feminism. Through historical contextualization of the woman-as-doll, muse and femme fatale, Tonkin tests Carter''s own description of her fiction as a form of literary criticism.
Trade Review'Maggie Tonkin's Angela Carter and Decadence makes a significant contribution to 'second-wave' Carter criticism twenty years after the writer's untimely death...the book explores a relatively neglected area in Carter criticism, considers a wide range of literary and non-literary sources, and makes a strong case for a reconsideration and reconciliation of the author's poetics and politics.' - Gramarye
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Fetishism or Fictional Critique? Olympia's Revenge: The Woman-Doll Dyad in The Magic Toyshop The Muse Exhumed: The Brief History of a Trope Re-Ambiguating the Muse in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman The 'Poe-etics' of Decomposition: 'The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe' and the Reading Effect Musing on Baudelaire: 'Black Venus' and the Poet as Dead Beloved Whose Fantasy is the Femme? Dialectical Dames: Thesis and Antithesis in The Sadeian Woman There Never was a Woman Like Leilah: The Passion of New Eve Conclusion Bibliography Index
