Rewriting The Body. Desire, Gender And Power In Selected Novels By Angela Carter

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The body has become a highly contested, political site in (post) modern literature and literary theory. In Angela Carter's work the image of the body is constructed around the tension between a post-structuralist notion of gender fluidity and a feminist reclaiming of the female body as a source of pleasure and power. This study examines the body politics in the last four novels Carter wrote between the seventies and the The Infernal Desire Machines, The Passion of New Eve, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist theory, it traces a development in Carter's fiction that moves from the pessimistic negation of a self-determined female corporeality to the assertion of the female body as a powerful site of alterity.