| This thesis examines the points of intersection between the writing of the English feminist writer, Angela Carter, and the discourse of carnival and the grotesque. Carter's work easily lends itself to such an approach. It is saturated with carnivalesque and grotesque material: bohemians, freaks and other outsiders populate her fiction, and many of her stories and novels take place in a world upside down in which the low, the disorderly and surreal rule. Her baroque, parodic style, moreover, is typical of the grotesque.;This thesis focuses on the negative side of carnival as explored by Carter in such dark earlier works as The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, The Sadeian Woman and "The Bloody Chamber." In these texts Carter problematizes the discourse of carnival and the grotesque and rewrites it from a feminist point of view.;In keeping with the spirit of her writing, I have tried to break down the convention that dictates that literature must be explained through criticism and theory. Instead of explicating Carter's texts through Bakhtin's, I construct a critical dialogue about women and the grotesque in which Carter comments on Bakhtin as much as Bakhtin comments on Carter. Extending the parameters of the discussion, I also put Carter and Bakhtin into play with relevant aspects of post-structuralist theory. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
