Nights at the Circus

Tall Tales and Brief Lives: Angela Carters Nights at the Circus

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Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carters penultima newfangled, epitomizes her wildly inventive, highly idiosyncratic mode of fiction, centered as it is on Fevvers, a Cockney artiste who claims to have grown wings. almost critics and reviewers have seen the main thrust of the novel to reside in the portrayal of Fevvers as a prototype of the New fair sex whose wings help her to escape from the nets of a patriarchal 19th century culture into a twentieth century womens liberationist haven of freedom. The novel ends with Fevvers astride her American lover, Walser (she now acting the missionary role), enjoying apparently two triumphs - sexual and psychological - in one: To think I really fooled you! she marveled. It just goes to turn in theres nothing like confidence (295). Yet when Carter was asked by John Haffenden what Fevvers agency by this, she replied, Its actually a statement ab come out of the closet the nature of fiction, about the nature of her narrative (90). The more you look almost at this novel, the more you realize just how literal Carter was organism in that reply.



More than any other of her works of fiction, Nights at the Circus bespeaks as its subject the hypnotic power of narrative, the slipway in which we construct ourselves and our world by narrative means, the corporeality of fiction and the fictionality of the material world, and the contract between writer and lecturer that, according to Carter, invites the reader at the end of this book to take one further step into the fictionality of the narrative, instead of coming out of it and looking at it as though it were an artefact (Haffenden 91). It is not just Fevvers who triumphs at having fooled Walser. It is Carter gloating over having fooled the reader into side by side(p) her own narrative to this end point - and beyond.

What this suggests is that this entire novel operates in an important way as a stimulate of metanarrative: one of its main concerns is with...If you want to get a across-the-board essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com



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