F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B R E S O U R C E S 129 2003 A very short introductory guide that provides an overview of Carter’s work and is designed to be a useful first stop for those readers previously unfamiliar with her work Edited collections Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity Feminism, London: Longman, 1997 Again, although this is an excellent general collection with a particularly useful introduction, only two essays relate in any direct way to Nights at the Circus Clare Hanson’s ‘ “The Red Dawn Breaking over Clapham”: Carter and the Limits of Artifice’ (pp 59–72) compares Nights at the Circus with Wise Children in the context of an argument informed by the work of Michel Foucault (see Text and contexts, pp 24–26) that questions the extent to which either novel challenges existing structures of social and symbolic power Sarah Bannock’s ‘Autobiographical Souvenirs in Nights at the Circus’ (pp 198–215) reads the novel as a form of depersonalized ‘auto/biography’, one that is more revealing about the literary influences, culture and history in which Carter operated than it is about the particular facts of her life Lorna Sage (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, London: Virago, 1994 An influential collection on Carter’s work as a whole that sparked much later work Though none of the essays deals exclusively with Nights at the Circus, Isobel Armstrong’s ‘Woolf by the Lake, Woolf at the Circus: Carter and Tradition’ (pp 257–78) contains the most sustained discussion of the novel, which she places in the tradition of extravagant fantasy literature by women, of which she finds Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) exemplary Marina Warner’s ‘Angela Carter: Bottle Blonde, Double Drag’ (pp 243–56) identifies the novel as a turning point in Carter’s writing after which her view of fairy tales shifts in a way that affects her writing as a whole, bringing about a greater emphasis on ‘comic defiance’ (p 247) Book chapters Shirley Peterson, ‘Freaking Feminism: The Lifes and Loves of a She-Devil and Nights at the Circus as Narrative Freak Shows’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp 291–301 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, London: Routledge, 1995 Chapter 3, ‘Revamping Spectacle: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, is an important and lengthy consideration of the novel’s relationship to feminism A shorter version has been reprinted in Alison Easton (ed.), Angela Carter: Contemporary Critical Essays, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000 Lorna Sage, Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992 Contains a stylish and very instructive overview of Carter’s work, though it stops at Nights at the Circus