Jeannette Baxter, ‘Postmodernism’ Jeannette Baxter is an associate tutor at the University of East Anglia, specializing in contemporary British fiction but with a particular interest in the cultural and intellectual legacies of surrealism in post-war British fiction Her interest in the counter-historical dimensions of Angela Carter’s literary postmodernism is part of a wider research project into experimental historiographic practices in the work of Angela Carter, as well as a range of post-war British authors such as J G Ballard, Kasuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, John Fowles and Doris Lessing Her focus on the intertextual nature of Carter’s writing stems from a research project (headed by Lorna Sage) in which she collated Angela Carter’s private library In this essay, Baxter takes issue with Aidan Day’s reading of Nights at the Circus (see Texts and contexts, pp 56–9) wherein he argues that the novel’s engagement with the history and politics of late-nineteenth-century Britain prevents it from being properly postmodern She argues instead that Carter excavates and engages with certain specific aspects of postmodern literature and culture in order to fashion and advance her wider and ongoing feminist project By tracing a range of techniques, such as pastiche, parody and, in particular, intertextuality (see Text and contexts, pp 31–4), she explores the ways in which Carter draws upon postmodern strategies in order to create new critical perspectives that place official, male-authored versions of history and culture on trial Baxter, however, also notes that Carter does not embrace postmodernism wholeheartedly or uncritically Postmodern views of identity as a purely performative or fragmenting construct (see Text and contexts, pp 31–4), she believes, not quite fit Carter’s feminist agenda, nor postmodern poetics that would engage in ‘a kind of terminal reflexiveness, a notion of fiction as a vacated funhouse’ correspond with Carter’s idea of fiction’s role as a form of historical and cultural critique.1 The chapter begins, therefore, by asserting that Lorna Sage, Angela Carter: Writers and Their Work, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994, p 58