| dc.contributor.author | Olchowy, James Richard. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:35:54Z | |
| dc.date.available | 1994 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1994 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINN98916 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55453 | |
| dc.description | This thesis constitutes a fairly comprehensive analysis of the fiction and non-fiction of the contemporary British author Angela Carter. The central question addressed is this: in what ways do the women and men in Carter's novels and tales from the mid-1960s to the early-1990s both suffer from and elude the "mind-forged manacles" governing the oppressive worlds in which they live? | en_US |
| dc.description | In the Introduction, I provide an overview of Carter's development as a writer, describing three general periods into which her fiction falls. Chapter One focuses on Carter's first four novels, written in the Sixties--her first period. These novels are interpreted as fictions of diagnosis and despair in which she identifies problems stemming from human oppression. | en_US |
| dc.description | Chapter Two briefly discusses the important transformation that Carter's thinking and fiction undergo in the Seventies, her second period. In Chapter Three, Carter's fifth novel, Love is analyzed as a work marking the initial signs of that transformation, which causes her to adopt an increasingly fantastic, metafictional, and deconstructive style. In Chapter Four, selected tales from Fireworks are studied as self-conscious pieces in which Carter challenges fictionally the "mind-forged manacles" that have imprisoned the characters in her work to this point. In Chapter Five, her two picaresque novels of the Seventies, Hoffman and New Eve, are introduced. Hoffman is examined as a novel in which Carter, by studying a prominent man's oppressed condition, underscores history's corruption by myth. | en_US |
| dc.description | In Chapter Six, the climax of the thesis, Carter's most important work of non-fiction, The Sadeian Woman, is analyzed as the text in which she reaches some tentative solutions regarding the problem of oppression. By studying the life of Sade and deconstructing his pornographic fiction, she reveals how the deeply rooted gender dichotomy of Western culture might be subverted and overcome through a new kind of fiction, "moral pornography," and women's emancipation. In Chapter Seven, I show how Carter's insights about overcoming oppression bear upon New Eve, an anti-mythic novel in which her deconstructive urge reaches its zenith. | en_US |
| dc.description | Finally, in Chapter Eight, I discuss Carter's third period, in which she fictionally explores the liberating potential of folklore and women's storytelling. In the works of this final phase, Carter's resurgent faith in the power of narrative to re-interpret and re-fashion the world, thus continually eliciting new perspectives and previously unheard or marginalized voices, demonstrates her conviction that the active, exploratory, uncensored human imagination, in women and men, is the best defense against oppression in contemporary culture. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1994. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Biography. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Women's Studies. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, English. | en_US |
| dc.title | Eluding "mind-forg'd manacles": Resisting oppression in the fiction of Angela Carter. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
