Recommended Reading:
Thursday, November 01, 2012
Please don't miss "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter" by fairy tale scholar Marina Warner, which is over on the Paris Review site.
Warner writes: "Angela Carter...refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself."
So very true. In the mythic arts field we owe an enormous debt to Angela Carter, whose influence on contemporary fairy tale literature remains unsurpassed to this day.
Art above: "Little Red Riding Hood" by Gustave Doré (1832-1883)