Angela Carter: The Rational Glass

This full scale study discusses Angela Carter's fiction in chronological order, and notes that her themes are fairly consistent throughout her work; but consistency of theme is not the same thing as repetition. The new angles and emphases that develop are partly from Carter's immersion in the changing intellectual debates of the times, and concurrently, arise from the reading she was doing at the different stages of her life, which stretched from the Medieval through de Sade to Foucault. Aidan Day describes theoretical arguments on the Enlightenment, modernity, feminism and postmodernism in a way which does not assume too much prior knowledge. Broader in its appeal than much of the specialist work written on Carter, which tends to stress special interests in fantasy, sexuality or the gothic, Day's clarity and thoroughness are refreshing in that they credit Angela Carter's fiction with the central place that it deserves.