JEANNETTE BAXTER 107 postmodern aesthetics in order to fashion a subversive feminist critique While pastiche functions to create sites of narrative resistance from which female subjects can speak back to male-authored discourses which threaten to deny them, the novel’s parodic textures posit a move away from history as a homogenous and flat narrative towards a form of historical representation which is multilayered and heterogeneous Carter’s version of intertextuality, meanwhile, not only invites the reader to challenge normative textual boundaries and reader–text paradigms in order to participate in the making of a dense and alternative cultural history, but its mobilizing, counter-historical presence forges a series of dissenting discursive spaces A significant achievement of Carter’s bricolage narrative, therefore, is that it calls for a review of materialist feminism and postmodernism as exclusive and antagonistic Indeed, one conclusion that Carter urges the reader to make at the end of Nights at the Circus is that the potential for political and historical progress can be negotiated through the juxtaposition (as embodied by Fevvers) of postmodernist and feminist discourse For it is out of this uncommon alliance that a revised historical viewpoint might just emerge which will finally allow the underdogs (the circus ‘freak’ and the ‘fallen woman’) to speak their place in the world of the text and to take their place in the text of the world