ABSTRACT
Angela Carter’s work forms one of the most interesting and provocative counter-historical projects in contemporary fiction. History, in her writing, is no longer the domain of facts. It is a self-contradictory, problematic, conglomerated inheritance of meanings. The primary focus of her texts is the figure of ‘woman’, and the legacy of encrusted meanings and values which come to define her contours. Carter’s fiction was amongst the first of a new generation of writing, which emerged as a response to the countercultural revolutions of the late 1960s. As she says in her 1983 essay ‘Notes From the Front Line’:
I can date to that time and to some of those debates and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing.
