ABSTRACT
The moment to commemorate twenty-five years since Angela Carter’s death (in 1992) brought into light new themes since she was revisited as a postmodern and feminist writer with a demythologizing project. The approach is still to celebrate what has been Carter’s extraordinary imagination on “identity constructions, power relations and difference” (Gina Wisker, Angela Carter’s Pyrotechnics, 2022), while the specialists continue to look forward to multidisciplinary critical perspectives. In the twenty-first century, we can go from Angela Carter: New Critical Readings (2014), a book on her legacy as feminist provocateur and postmodern stylist focusing on her rescript of the canon, surrealism and poetics, to Angela Carter’s Pyrotechnics on Japanese signs, music, and performance, as ways of challenging hegemonic visions and the materiality of the senses.
This chapter elaborates on Carter’s response to Shakespeare in a postmodern context. In fact, Carter recognizes Shakespeare’s influence by weaving into her novels a deconstructive critical reading of him, embodying sensations of performance through the morpho-syntactic and lexical richness and excessiveness of her style. Hence, the intention is to analyse how this late twentieth-century novelist engages in dialogue on an equal footing with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear in her last novel, Wise Children (1991). There, Carter cuts across the performance of identity and defies and troubles our assumptions about the Bard of Avon, inviting us to deconstruct and reconstruct some of the still traditional readings of his plays.
