Ancient Mesopotamia, the Zodiac, and the land of the dead feature in this wildly surrealistic adventure story—Leonora Carrington’s revolutionary first novel, long out of print.The Stone Door is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a puzzle box, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Kabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles...

This book explores Angela Carter's creative and critical afterlives as well as the multiple ways in which her work is amenable to being read through current critical and cultural theories.Examining topics as diverse as theatrical adaptations of Carter's novels, her 'post-human politics', magic realism and the inspiration of her work for contemporary writers, the essays in this collection demonstrate Carter's continuing relevance into the 21st century.This v...

This book provides a fresh look at Angela Carter's critical and intertextual engagements with the past.Examining a broad range of Carter's work (novels, short stories, poetry, as well as stage plays), the essays in this collection explore a stimulating selection of topics, including folk song, medieval literature, and the occult. Frequently drawing on newly available archival material, the volume investigates the ways in which Carter wove allusions into her own nar...

A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine surrealist prose texts written in French, English, Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese, from the emergence of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, through the post-war and postmodern periods, and up to the contemporary moment. This ap...

Surrealist women’s writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers’ work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for exam...

In 1972, Angela Carter translated Xavière Gauthier’s ground-breaking feminist critique of the surrealist movement, Surréalisme et sexualité (1971). Although the translation was never published, the project at once confirmed and consolidated Carter’s previous interest in surrealism, representation, gender and desire and aided her formulation of a new surrealist-feminist aesthetic. Carter’s sustained engagement with surrealist aesthetics and politics as well as surrealist scholarshi...

A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism's most compelling figuresIn 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together i...

“Complete Stories, a collection of Carrington’s published and unpublished short stories—many newly translated from their original French and Spanish—is a terrific introduction to her bizarre, dreamlike worlds.” —Carmen Maria Machado, NPRSurrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these...

From the apparently simple adaptation of a text into film, theatre or a new literary work, to the more complex appropriation of style or meaning, it is arguable that all texts are somehow connected to a network of existing texts and art forms. In this new edition Adaptation and Appropriation explores:multiple definitions and practices of adaptation and appropriationthe cultural and aesthetic politics behind the impulse to adaptthe global and local...

A highly original and influential work of modern British literature, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus combines a fantastically creative plot with a strong political undertone. The result is an emotive and provocative novel, which has attracted much critical attention from a range of perspectives including poststructuralism, gender studies, postmodernism and psychoanalysis.This guide to Angela Carter’s complex novel, presents:an accessible introduction to ...

Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers interrogates the vexed question of Angela Carter’s feminist politics through the dusty lens of European Gothic. It illuminates her ambivalent relation to some of her most contentious European literary forebears, reveals her rich knowledge of French literature and offers fresh insights into her literary practices afforded by newly available archival material.This book analyses Carter’s textual engagements with a dirty lineage of European Goth...