122 CRITICAL READINGS Both the clowns of Colonel Kearney’s circus and Fevvers, therefore, embody many of the defining aspects of popular culture: its exuberant energy, its vulgarity and grotesqueness The fact that they so in ways that the novel – through the very different fates they meet – goes to some lengths to distinguish, speaks clearly of the way Nights at the Circus engages with popular culture more broadly in the novel There is no doubt that the majority of the novel’s characters and settings, as well of many of its key references, belong to popular rather than high art and that, in this way, the novel validates popular forms as key resources for complex sets of historical, philosophical and cultural significance Carter’s use of popular allusion, however, needs to be distinguished from its usage by the high modernists to whom she refers indirectly in the novel because she does not share their pessimistic view that fragmentation, misery and meaninglessness are the inevitable fate of humankind in the twentieth century Nor does she completely embrace the postmodernist view that this fragmentation is merely playful In its portrait of the clowns and circus, Nights at the Circus, therefore, never leaves behind either its awareness of relevant ‘high’ cultural contexts or its integration of the critical and philosophical theory that becomes the vehicle for the novel’s critical distance from the giddy pleasures of the popular as well as its political engagement with history, gender and representation Finally, Nights at the Circus also shows that popular culture can be taken seriously without being hitched to a corresponding belief that philosophy and critical theory can be distributed in the same terms as popular culture, or vice versa