Book review of Anna Watz's Angela Carter and Surrealism: « A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic.»

A free spirit who rejected feminist orthodoxy and puritanism in favor of daring, adventurous, and experimental flights of imagination to explore female identity, sexuality, and agency as part of her “demythologizing” project, Angela Carter is one of the most compelling, inspiring, and influential voices in late twentieth-century British fiction. Unsurprisingly, Carter’s feminism has been hotly debated since 1979, when The Bloody Chamber, her collection of innovative, woman-centered, stylistically versatile, and sexually candid “stories about fairy stories” (Shaking A Leg [1997, 38]), and The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), her polemical essay on Sade as a “moral pornographer,” made a splash in the midst of a heated debate..