ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with an analysis of the dominant themes and motifs of Angela Carter novels and poems from the 1960s. It analyzes the personal and intellectual transformations that developed between her early marriage in the 1960s and her time living in Japan. The book explores the androgyne's significance in the Western Tradition, from Plato, the medieval alchemists, Rosicrucianism, Jungian psychology. It analyzes the importance of Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein in bringing together all the attractions and problems Carter had with both surrealism and psychoanalytic theory. The book examines Carter's final novel and other writings in relation to the tensions set up in her uses and critiques of surrealism and psychoanalysis. It examines how Nights at the Circus, which Carter intended as a quiet novel of ideas called Philosophic Assassins, quickly morphed into a large-scale attempt to offer another deconstruction of the Oedipal logic.