Helen Stoddart, ‘Popular Culture, Carnival and Clowns’ Helen Stoddart is a lecturer in literature and film at the University of Keele She is the author of Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), an investigation of the cultural history of the circus in Britain and North America as well as an examination of the relationship between circus and forms of representational art, specifically film and literature Her interest in Angela Carter, therefore, stems from Carter’s fascination with other forms of spectacular entertainment and culture, such as circus and film She has also published ‘The Passion of New Eve and the Cinema: Hysteria, Spectacle, Masquerade’, in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic: Essays and Studies 2001, The English Association: Cambridge, 2001, pp 111–32 Nights at the Circus provides an excellent example of the peculiar critical double bind in which Angela Carter found herself in her relationship to popular culture On the one hand, as we saw (see Critical history, pp 43–5), negative reviewers of the novel settled on terms such as ‘vulgar’ and ‘excessive’ to describe her writing As Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton also point out, critics have too speedily identified an affinity between this perceived stylistic excess and Carter’s attraction to the ‘trashy glitziness’ of popular theatrical modes such as circus, music hall and pantomime, as though her attraction to ‘showiness’ in theme as well as style somehow makes her work incompatible with serious thought and social engagement.1 Yet an equally common criticism of the novel is that it makes too many demands on its readers with its ‘politicized’, complex and dizzying levels of allusion to the ‘high cultural’ domains of European literature and philosophy – with the implication that this would be inconsistent with the ‘appropriate’ use of familiar popular forms The following analysis examines the specific uses of popular culture – particularly carnival and circus – in Nights at the Circus in order to assess Carter’s relationship to popular pleasures and challenges in the novel Bristow and Broughton, The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, p