“Ours is an Orgiastic, Not an Ecstatic Culture.” Angela Carter Discusses Cultural Expressions of Sexuality in her Non-Fiction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2023-45.1.04Abstract
“I found myself, as I grew older, increasingly writing about sexuality and its manifestations in human practice. And I found most of my raw material in the lumber room of the Western European imagination,” Angela Carter wrote in “Notes from the Front Line.” The passage is significant for several reasons. Carter identifies sexuality in its diverse manifestations as her main concern and acknowledges images derived from European popular tradition as the source of her “raw material.” Moreover, she characterises her prose as intertextual and identifies herself as a Caucasian Westerner. It is from this contemporary, Europe-centred perspective that she, first, surveys manifestations of sexuality, and then uses them to create her own—often allegorical—imaginative stories. This paper is concerned with the former stage of Carter’s intellectual endeavour: surveying expressions of sexuality in public discourse from a Western woman’s point of view.
Downloads
References
Adorno, Theodor. 2005a. “The Meaning of Working Through the Past.” In Adorno 2005b, 89-103.
—, 2005b. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1990. The Fashion System. Translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Bristow, Joseph and Trev Lynn Broughton. 1997. The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter. New York: Longman.
Caroll, Rachel. 2018a. “‘She had never been a woman’: Second Wave Feminism, Femininity and Transgender in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977).” In Caroll 2018b, 64-86.
—, 2018b. Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Carter, Angela. 1979. The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago.
—, 1992. Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings. London: Virago.
—, 1997. Shaking a Leg. London: Chatto and Windus.
Cook, Hera. 2014. “Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman and Female Desire in England 1960–1975.” Women’s History 23 (6): 938-56.
Crofts, Charlotte. 2006. “‘The Other of the Other’: Angela Carter’s ‘New-Fangled’ Orientalism.” In Mundord 2006, 87-109.
Dimovitz, Scott A. 2016. Angela Carter. Surrealist, Psychoanalyst, Moral Pornographer. New York: Routledge.
Dworkin, Andrea. 1979. Pornography. Men Possessing Women. New York: Putnam.
Gamble, Sarah. 1997. Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
—, 2009. Angela Carter. A Literary Life. London: Macmillan.
Gordon, Edmund. 2016. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. New York: Oxford UP.
Katsavos, Anna. 1994. “Conversation with Angela Carter By Anna Katsavos.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 14 (3): 11-17.
Lesinska, Sophie. 1999. “Sixty Years After the Surrealist Revolt: Epistemology and Politics in Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains and The Sadeian Woman.” CEA Critic 61 (2/3): 99–114.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press.
Mundord, Rebecca, ed. 2006. Re-visiting Angela Carter. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pasolini, Anna. 2012. “‘The Mysterious Other’: Carter’s Japanese Reflections.” Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays 8 (11): 131-48.
Rose, Brad. 1990. “The Triumph of Social Control? A Look at Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, 25 Years Later.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 35: 55-68.
Ryan-Sauntour, Michelle. 2007. “Autobiographical Estrangement in Angela Carter’s ‘A Souvenir of Japan’, ‘The Smile of Winter’ and ‘Flesh and the Mirror’.” Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, 32. [Accessed January 21, 2023].
Said, Edward. 1977. Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Snaith, Helen. 2018. “‘Fictions written in a certain city’: Representations of Japan in Angela Carter’s work. ” PhD diss., Swansea University.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
