2007angela Carter S Nights at The Circus A Routledge Study Guide 1st Edition Helen Stoddart Full
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Angela Carter’s
Nights at the Circus
Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), a highly original and influential
work of modern British literature, combines a fantastically creative plot with a
strong political undertone. The result is an emotive and provocative novel, which
has attracted much critical attention from a range of perspectives including post-
structuralism, gender studies, postmodernism and psychoanalysis.
This guide to Angela Carter’s richly complex novel offers:
• an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Nights at the Circus;
• a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publi-
cation to the present;
• a selection of new critical essays on the Nights at the Circus, by Jeannette
Baxter, Heather Johnson, Sarah Sceats and Helen Stoddart, providing a
variety of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical
approaches identified in the survey section;
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links
between texts, contexts and criticism;
• suggestions for further reading.
Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading
for all those beginning detailed study of Nights at the Circus and seeking not only
a guide to the novel, but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical
material that surrounds Carter’s text.
Already available:*
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Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus by Helen Stoddart
Angela Carter’s
Nights at the Circus
Helen Stoddart
First published 2007
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.
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collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Introduction xi
2: Critical history 41
Reviews 43
Gender, feminism and the carnivalesque 46
Performance and masquerade 50
Freakery and the grotesque 52
History and politics 56
Postmodernism and history 58
Genre: picaresque, magic realism and Gothic 63
viii CONTENTS
3: Critical readings 67
Index 133
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Notes and references
Primary text
Unless otherwise stated, all references to the primary text are taken from Nights
at the Circus, Angela Carter (London: Vintage, 1984). The initial reference in
each part will contain full bibliographic details and all subsequent references will
be in parentheses in the body of the text, stating the part number, chapter and
page number, e.g. (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 1). The part and chapter numbers are provided
to help anyone reading an edition of the novel that differs from this one.
Secondary text
References to any secondary material can be found in the footnotes. The first
reference will contain full bibliographic details, and each subsequent reference
to the same text will contain the author’s surname, title and page number.
Cross-referencing
Cross-referencing between sections is a feature of each volume in the Routledge
Guides to Literature series. Cross-references appear in brackets and include
section titles as well as the relevant page numbers in bold type, e.g., (see Texts and
contexts, pp. 1–39 ).
Introduction
Although Angela Carter died in 1991, in the year 2006 her work had never been
more popular or celebrated. This year saw an abundance of activity, all confirm-
ing the enduring presence of the considerable range and quantity of writing she
produced. Indeed, it is as though she has finally come into her own, as though the
publishing industry and reading public alike required time to catch up and catch
on to the pleasures and innovations laid out in her startling and provocative
literary legacy. The publisher Vintage has relaunched many of her titles, includ-
ing Nights at the Circus, in new editions, all of which include introductions by
contemporary authors (Ali Smith, Michael Moorcock, Helen Simpson, Sarah
Waters) who have been impressed and influenced by her work. All sport voguish
cover designs by the fashionable Dutch graphic artist Pieter ‘Parra’ Janssen.1
The new series was launched in June 2006 with a day-long event of readings and
talks at London’s South Bank Centre. Earlier that year, a musical stage adaptation
of Nights at the Circus performed by Kneehigh Theatre toured England and
received excellent reviews (see Further reading, p. 126). Carter’s work is finding
new and wider audiences and there is a fresh understanding of its dramatic and
theatrical qualities.
Highly theatrical in style, content and structure, Nights at the Circus mimics
the classic three-act play (including a final ‘Envoi’). It is divided into three sections
as the narrative moves from the ‘London’ of Fevvers’ childhood and theatrical
fame to ‘Petersburg’ where she joins Colonel Kearney’s circus on its ‘Grand
Imperial Tour’ and is then literally and violently derailed in the ‘Siberia’ section
when the circus train crashes in an expansive, freezing and threatening wilder-
ness. On this journey, a vast array of unlikely characters make their entrances and
exits, including the occupants of a female-run brothel in London, a troupe of
clowns, a talking pig, a grand duke, an entire penal colony of female convicts and
a shaman. Its touchstones throughout, however, are the controversially winged
performer, Fevvers, her long-time companion and surrogate mother, Lizzie, and
Walser, the young American journalist who is determined to make his reputation
1 Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus, London: Vintage, 1994. All further references shall be to this
edition and will appear in the body text.
xii INTRODUCTION
by exposing what he suspects is the fakery of Fevvers’ wings but who ends up
falling in love with her.
When Fevvers strikes her thigh on the first page of the novel, guffaws ‘uproari-
ously’ and declaims ‘ “Lor’ love you, sir!” ’ to Walser, the reporter interviewing
her, she also strikes three of the key notes of the novel: love, laughter and boister-
ously cheeky energy. The wit and inventiveness of Angela Carter’s writing, how-
ever, rules out sentimentality; the love and laughter that begin and end the novel
are examined throughout for their destructive as well as their liberating effects
and for the politics or power relations that lie within each. The novel’s theatrical
structure and unlikely cast of characters are also crucial to the way it works to
construct a highly fragmented, at times absurd, narrative that constantly plays
tricks with time, not just moving backwards and forwards but also blurring
the sense of separation between categories of time. In other words, the force and
innovation of Nights at the Circus lies in the way that it continually breaks
open so many of the structures that derive power from presenting themselves as
‘natural’ and therefore unchanging. The novel enjoys and indulges the pleasures
of artifice – Fevvers is the embodiment of this indulgence – but in doing so it also
lays bare the artifice, the workings through which so many constructs (time,
literary narrative, the self, language, laughter, the social order) have, like Fevvers,
been made up. Thus, both the novel’s intellectual challenge to its readers and its
facility to engender astonishment and delight in them are borne out of a radical
politics of reading. In showing how fictions are put together and how they might
also be blasted apart, it lays open the possibility of putting things together again
anew: to see, to understand and to read in new ways.
As this summary of the novel indicates, Angela Carter is undoubtedly one of the
most distinctive and daring voices in twentieth-century British literature, with
Nights at the Circus her most dramatic novel and, as Sarah Waters confirms, also
her ‘masterpiece’.2 Uniquely, it combines the intellectual ambition, social criticism
and plundering of high art and popular or folk culture that characterizes Carter’s
earlier works, with the same jovial good humour as Wise Children. It is a novel,
therefore, that both charms and challenges its readers at all turns. Thus, the
purpose of this guide to the novel, and the critical responses to it, is to open up
and elucidate its challenges without mitigating its considerable charms. In doing
so, it sets out a series of key literary, philosophical and historical contexts within
which this novel can be placed and better understood: Angela Carter’s life and
works, the political and social conditions of Britain in the 1980s, the work of
other women artists during this period, the critical theory and philosophy which
are woven into the fabric of the fiction, the literary genres with which the novel
has been associated and the history of critical responses to the novel. Finally, four
new essays have been commissioned for this guide, each one being both a map of
an existing field of investigation (postmodernism, magical realism, performance
and popular culture) as well as fresh approach to each of these key aspects of the
novel.
2 Sarah Waters, quoted in Christina Patterson, ‘Angela Carter: Beauty and the Beasts’, Independent,
18 January 2006.
1
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