The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Angela Carter by Linden Peach
Joanne Gass

Linden Peach. Angela Carter. St. Martin’s, 1998. 183 pp. $35.00.

By including Angela Carter in its Modern Novelists series, St. Martin’s Press has inducted her into the pantheon of important twentieth-century authors—a well-deserved addition.
Linden Peach’s lucid explication of Carter’s works provides a useful resource for future scholars. He asserts that Carter contributes to the development of the novel through a cultural critique which renders her own culture as “foreign.” The importance of this project for future critics, he says, includes “the need to recognize how her novels deconstruct the processes that produce social structures and shared meaning, evident, for example, in her recurrent demythologizing of the mother figure and in the way in which the manifestation of the female body in her work disrupts the social construction of women as Woman.”
By connecting thematic elements from The Sadean Woman to his analysis of her novels, Peach weaves a persuasive argument for assessing Carter’s oeuvre as a unified and coherent whole. He outlines her skepticism about all mythologies, including our most recent ones, and her exploration of the role of dominant discourses in character formation. However, Carter did not, he says, simply foreground the problems; her novels emphasize the importance of transgression—of breaking things—in overturning old myths and developing self-autonomy, and she insisted that human beings must take control of language if they wish to establish identity. In making his case Peach effortlessly and judiciously employs contemporary theoretical approaches to illuminate Carter’s thematic concerns without resorting to the heavy-handed use of obfuscating jargon. He provides us with a useful and interesting addition to a growing body of work on an important, and greatly missed, voice. [Joanne Gass]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Angela Carter by Linden Peach Joanne Gass Linden Peach. Angela Carter. St. Martin’s, 1998. 183 pp. $35.00. By including Angela Carter in its Modern Novelists series, St. Martin’s Press has inducted her into the pantheon of important twentieth-century authors—a well-deserved addition. Linden Peach’s lucid explication of Carter’s works provides a useful resource for future scholars. He asserts that Carter contributes to the development of the novel through a cultural critique which renders her own culture as “foreign.” The importance of this project for future critics, he says, includes “the need to recognize how her novels deconstruct the processes that produce social structures and shared meaning, evident, for example, in her recurrent demythologizing of the mother figure and in the way in which the manifestation of the female body in her work disrupts the social construction of women as Woman.” By connecting thematic elements from The Sadean Woman to his analysis of her novels, Peach weaves a persuasive argument for assessing Carter’s oeuvre as a unified and coherent whole. He outlines her skepticism about all mythologies, including our most recent ones, and her exploration of the role of dominant discourses in character formation. However, Carter did not, he says, simply foreground the problems; her novels emphasize the importance of transgression—of breaking things—in overturning old myths and developing self-autonomy, and she insisted that human beings must take control of language if they wish to establish identity. In making his case Peach effortlessly and judiciously employs contemporary theoretical approaches to illuminate Carter’s thematic concerns without resorting to the heavy-handed use of obfuscating jargon. He provides us with a useful and interesting addition to a growing body of work on an important, and greatly missed, voice. [Joanne Gass]

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