Rewriting the Body: Desire, Gender and Power in Selected Novels by Angela Carter

The body has become a highly contested, political site in (post)modern literature and literary theory. In Angela Carter’s work the image of the body is constructed around the tension between a post-structuralist notion of gender fluidity and a feminist reclaiming of the female body as a source of pleasure and power. This study examines the body politics in the last four novels Carter wrote between the seventies and the nineties: The Infernal Desire Machines, The Passion of New Eve, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist theory, it traces a development in Carter’s fiction that moves from the pessimistic negation of a self-determined female corporeality to the assertion of the female body as a powerful site of alterity.