Angela Carter’s Critique of Her Contemporary World
Politics, History, and Mortality
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the editors
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Historical Background
- Critical Context: Biographical Studies
- Methodology
- Biopower, Mortality, and the Post-War Period
- Overview
- Chapter One The Silent Response to the “Insane World”
- Mental Disorders and the Absence of Politics
- Characterisations in the Bristol Trilogy
- Carter and R. D. Laing
- Challenging Mortality: Mental Illness and the “Insane” World
- Psychic Numbing
- Farewell to the Sixties
- Chapter Two Natural/Violent Death in the Twentieth Century
- Fairy Tales and Death
- Violent and Natural Death
- The Hidden Trauma: South London, the Crystal Palace, and the Blitz
- Melanie’s Trauma: Recurring Images of Mutilated Bodies
- Uncle Philip: Manageable and Unmanageable Death
- Problems of Death
- Chapter Three Rousseau in a Post-Apocalyptic Context
- Carter, Science Fiction, and Rousseau
- The Nuclear War as the “Original Sin” in Oblivion
- The Frozen Time: The Professors
- Living in the Present: The Barbarians
- Feminist Critique: The Professors and the Barbarians
- The Out People
- The End of “Human History”
- The Tragic Ending
- Chapter Four The Imaginary Arms Race and the Cultural Wreckage:
- The Cold War and the Crisis of Human Cultures
- Military Desire: The Political Subject
- Economic Desire: The Intertextual Structure
- Cultures as “Junk”
- The Reality War and the Cold War
- The Lost Samples: Carter and J. G. Ballard
- The Cultural Wreckage and the Nuclear Age
- Chapter Five Hollywood, Femininity, and the Cold War
- Gender Roles in the Cold War Era
- America, Tristessa, and the Hollywood Illusions
- The Domestic Containment and the Cultural Construction of “Woman”
- The Dystopian Situation and Mortality
- Repudiating the “Ideal” Family
- The Cinematic Re-Education
- “Demythologising Business” in a Social Context
- Chapter Six Carter, Thatcherism, and International Politics after Détente
- Carter in the 1980s
- Thatcherism and the British Empire
- The Soviet/Russian “Empire” and the Socialist Revolution
- American “Empire” and Capitalist Economy
- Mortality, Contingency, and War Memories
- Capitalism, Socialism, and the End of the Cold War
- From the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Bibliographic Information published by the
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
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Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-3-631-83037-6 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-83376-6 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-83377-3 (EPUB)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-83378-0 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/b17500
© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Berlin 2021
All rights reserved.
Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien
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This publication has been peer reviewed.
About the editors
Yutaka Okuhata teaches post-war English literature at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo. He studied at Keio University, the University of Tokyo, and Birkbeck College, University of London. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of London in 2019.
About the book
Yutaka Okuhata
Angela Carter’s Critique of
Her Contemporary World
This research sheds new light on Angela Carter’s critique of her contemporary world, not only as a feminist and socialist but also as a political writer who lived through the twentieth century, an unprecedented period when even the meanings of life, death, and survivability changed drastically. The book examines Carter’s portrayals of mortality in her nine novels through the lens of the Cold War and subsequent fears of nuclear catastrophe and sudden death, alongside the comfort blanket of the post-war welfare state. Focusing on the mutual dialogues between Carter and actual historical events, from Hiroshima and the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Thatcherism, the book aims to reconsider her oeuvre from a twenty-first century perspective.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my supervisors, Professor Heike Bauer and Dr. Joe Brooker at Birkbeck College, University of London, for reading the earlier drafts of each chapter and providing me with a number of helpful suggestions and comments during my Ph.D. study, as well as to the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO) for funding this research. I would also like to thank Professor Sue Wiseman for her encouragement and guidance during the seminars for first-year Ph.D. students and Professor Roger Luckhurst for his insightful advice on my chapter draft and thesis outline. As Ph.D. examiners, Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts at the University of the West of England, Bristol and Dr. Nick Hubble at Brunel University London offered me valuable feedback.
I am also grateful to Professor Yoshiki Tajiri and Professor Kaz Oishi at the University of Tokyo, whose recommendations made it possible for me to study in London, in addition to the staff of the various libraries I occasionally used. I sincerely appreciate the discussions I had with other scholars at conferences and would especially like to thank two Japanese experts of Angela Carter studies: Professor Natsumi Ikoma at International Christian University and Professor Mayako Murai at Kanagawa University. The earlier versions of Chapters Three and Six were previously published in Humanities, vol. 8, no. 3 (2019), The British Fantasy Society Journal, vol. 19 (2018), and Ad Alta: The Birmingham Journal of Literature, vol. 10 (2019). I would like to thank the editors of these journals for giving me permission to reproduce the articles. I also appreciate the Estate of Angela Carter that generously allowed me to use Angela Carter’s materials (These are Copyright © The Estate of Angela Carter. Reproduced by permission of the Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN). Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to my parents, Kazuhisa and Hiroko, for their support throughout my research, as well as to my late maternal grandmother, Mieko, for encouraging me to study abroad when I was in Japan.
Contents
Critical Context: Biographical Studies
Biopower, Mortality, and the Post-War Period
Mental Disorders and the Absence of Politics
Characterisations in the Bristol Trilogy
Challenging Mortality: Mental Illness and the “Insane” World
Chapter Two Natural/Violent Death in the Twentieth Century: The Magic Toyshop as a Modern Fairy Tale
The Hidden Trauma: South London, the Crystal Palace, and the Blitz
Melanie’s Trauma: Recurring Images of Mutilated Bodies
Uncle Philip: Manageable and Unmanageable Death
Carter, Science Fiction, and Rousseau
The Nuclear War as the “Original Sin” in Oblivion
The Frozen Time: The Professors
Living in the Present: The Barbarians
Feminist Critique: The Professors and the Barbarians
The Cold War and the Crisis of Human Cultures
Military Desire: The Political Subject
Economic Desire: The Intertextual Structure
The Reality War and the Cold War
The Lost Samples: Carter and J. G. Ballard
The Cultural Wreckage and the Nuclear Age
Gender Roles in the Cold War Era
America, Tristessa, and the Hollywood Illusions
The Domestic Containment and the Cultural Construction of “Woman”
The Dystopian Situation and Mortality
Repudiating the “Ideal” Family
“Demythologising Business” in a Social Context
Thatcherism and the British Empire
The Soviet/Russian “Empire” and the Socialist Revolution
American “Empire” and Capitalist Economy
Mortality, Contingency, and War Memories
Capitalism, Socialism, and the End of the Cold War
Details
- Pages
- 272
- Publication Year
- 2021
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631833766
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631833773
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783631833780
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631830376
- DOI
- 10.3726/b17500
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2020 (October)
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2021. 272 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG