Contents Notes and references ix Introduction xi 1: Text and contexts Angela Carter: biography and writing Academic contexts Internationalism Recognition Britain in the 1890s and the 1980s: Margaret Thatcher Britain in the 1960s: cultural change Literary contexts and beyond Critical contexts 10 12 21 Walter Benjamin and the ‘angel of history’ Michel Foucault and the panoptican Laura Mulvey, female stars and ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ Mikhail Bakhtin: the carnivalesque and the grotesque Postmodernism: intertextuality, bricolage and metafiction Magical realism Masquerade and the performative 2: Critical history Reviews Gender, feminism and the carnivalesque Performance and masquerade Freakery and the grotesque History and politics Postmodernism and history Genre: picaresque, magic realism and Gothic 21 24 26 27 31 34 37 41 43 46 50 52 56 58 63