Fluctuations of fantasy : postmodernist contamination in Angela Carter's fiction.

What I am offering in this thesis is a kind "contaminated" reading, that is a reading deeply involved
in the stylistic and ideological dissonances of Carter's fiction, to the point that they are assimilated
within different and, in some cases, contrastive interpretative paths. But the contamination works
also on another level: to read Carter is to tackle some very complex questions, including the possible
articulations of Marxism and deconstruction/postmodernism or, more generally, the role played by
ideology with reference to the tendencies and movements deriving from poststructuralism; my
argument is that Carter's writing itself is heavily "contaminated" by postmodernist aesthetics despite
her implicit denial and negative attitude towards it.
In the thesis I have discussed three collections of short-stones (The Bloody Chamber in
Chapter 1, Black Venus and Fireworks in Chapter II) and four novels (The Infernal Desire Machines
of Dr. Hoffman, The Passion of New Eve. Nights at Circus and Wise Children from Chapter HI to
VI). I have also quoted extensively from the numerous interviews given by Carter in different stages
of her career and from her critical works, in particular from The Sadeian Woman, a sort of aesthetic
manifesto for a literary corpus in which the worlds of Eros and sexuality play a crucial role in
transgressing and subverting the habitual dichotomies of gender. In the final Chapter (VII) Carter's
work is located in the framework of the debate between feminist and postmodernist thought.