ABSTRACT

Few novelists have written theatre and performance into their books as frequently as Angela Carter, and fewer still have engaged on the page with such a range of theatrical forms. Bringing her final novel Wise Children into conversation with several of her earlier works, my seventh chapter identifies two key concerns at the heart of Carter’s theatre-fiction: the consequences of severance from collective experience in a world where public sites of reception (from outdoor playing spaces and large playhouses to fairgrounds and circus tents) are increasingly usurped by intensely private, solipsistic modes of entertainment, and the fate of imagination and desire in a realm where the separations, seductive curtaining, and invisible offstage regions characteristic of proscenium structuring are increasingly eroded. I explore how her theatre-fiction probes and contests solipsistic diminishment, and, with reference to Jean Baudrillard, I examine the theatre and comedy of Wise Children as response to the pervasive obscenity of a late-century mediascape.