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Re-Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Ed. Rebecca Munford. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. xiv + 207 pp. £45.00. ISBN 1–4039–9705–5, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Page 97, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm106
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Extract
This collection of critical essays examines the various ways in which Angela Carter's engagement with a politics of intertextuality not only shaped her own writing practice but also informed the complex positioning of her relationship to feminism and postmodernism. The relevance of reading Carter through an intertextual framework, as these essays propose and demonstrate, is that it allows us to avoid categorisation and appreciate more fully the hybrid nature of her texts. Rebecca Munford, as the editor, has attempted to generate a wide range of discussion while also closely linking the contributors' topics through complementary themes. Thus, we have readings of Carter in the contexts of postcolonialism, feminism, carnival, horror, gothic and comic novel traditions, all in relation to texts by Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, Proust and Poe; and two essays give significant attention to her first novel, Shadow Dance, examining the formative influences of surrealism and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Although several of these essays perhaps end up overlapping too much in their reliance on similar critical sources and theoretical trends, they offer a lively contribution to Carter scholarship as well as many fascinating starting points from which to explore further intertextual relations in the author's body of work.