From Decadence to Dust: A Review Essay

Voir aussi : Maggie Tonkin. Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 223 p. ISBN 978-0-230-28415-9Rebecca Munford. Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 226 p. ISBN 978-0-7190-7671-8International audienceIn 1983 Carter declared in “Notes from the Front Line” that she was in the “demythologising business” and that she feels “free to loot and rummage in an official past, specifically a literary past,” in order to “check out what lies used to be à la mode and find the old lies on which new lies have been based” (74). Her interviews and nonfictional writings are littered with political declarations and intertextual metaphors to describe her fictional practices: “I’m all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” (“Notes” 69).1 Such declarations, together with terms such as demythologizing, have come to haunt the landscape of Angela Carter criticism, as many critics have attempted to address the complex, often feminist, politics of Carter’s rewriting practices. An earlier 2006 volume of critical essays edited by Rebecca Munford, Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, is an example of how scholars attempt to tease out the many strands of Carter’s intertextuality. [...]