100 CRITICAL READINGS determining’ while they simultaneously call the ‘entire notion of historical knowledge’ into question.15 Second, Day’s reluctance to explore the identifiably postmodern textures of Carter’s work (although he does acknowledge pastiche, intertextuality and reflexiveness as features of her writing) also closes down potentially valuable discussion about the ways in which Carter’s bricolage approach to postmodernism actually liberates the material histories which postmodernist fiction ostensibly denies Intertextuality does not function in Nights at the Circus, for instance, as a form of postmodern play that is estranged from historical reality Although Carter recognizes the potentially futile nature of embedded narrative forms – ‘Books about books is fun but frivolous’ – she fashions a unique intertextual space that is at once imaginatively charged and historically engaged.16 For the intertextual and historical layers which Carter deposits in her narrative generate the rubbing together of multiple layers – historical and imaginative, fact and fiction, past and present – in order to produce a dynamic space that is not ahistorical, but counter-historical Carter sets out to rewrite history by modifying traditional forms of historical representation, for, as Fevvers puts it: ‘It’s not the human “soul” that must be forged on the anvil of history but the anvil itself must be changed in order to change humanity’ (Pt III, Ch 7, p 240) By emphasizing the intertextual nature of history, Carter works towards forging a radical, revisionist history which boasts a double impulse First, it exposes the writing of history as a literary process and scrutinizes its forms of representation, which conspicuously omit, as Carter reminds us, ‘that statistically rather more than half the human race to which we belong’.17 Second, it disturbs the reader’s inherited assumptions, expectations and previously held views of history in order to engender a new historical perspective One intertextual reference that opens up the historical and political contexts of Carter’s novel is John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) Hailed as the ‘first pornographic novel written in English’, Cleland’s eighteenth-century vision of prostitution has courted controversy, censorship and prosecution.18 These are precisely the heretical qualities that make Cleland an important figure on Carter’s reading list alongside the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille (Carter published her own exercise in the cultural history of pornography, The Sadean Woman in 1979) Carter foregrounds issues surrounding literary censorship and moral propriety when Lizzie challenges Walser to publish exclusive excerpts from Fevvers’ apprenticeship in Ma Nelson’s brothel: ‘Come on, sir, will they let you print that in your newspapers? For these were women of the worst class and defiled’ (Pt I, Ch 2, p 21) Representing society’s official voice of condemnation, Lizzie’s emphases function ironically to hold the moral hypocrisy of Victorian society up to ridicule Declared the ‘great social evil’ by contemporary nineteenth-century commentators, prostitution was viewed as 15 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p 89 16 Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p 79 17 Angela Carter, ‘The Language of Sisterhood’, in Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (eds), The State of the Language, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980, p 227 18 P Fowler and A Jackson (eds), Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and Its Influences, New York: AMS Press, 2003, p xiii