SUBJECTIVE FICTIONS

All Realities Have Become Subjective Fictions

All Realities Have Become Subjective Fictions

Introduction

Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of then repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. Modernism to be known as the universal crisis Hispanic letters and spirit and is manifested in art, science, religion and politics. In some ways, an echo can be seen in subsequent movements and currents.

Comparing The Work Of the Artists

Angela Carter's writing

Angela Carter's writing went largely unappreciated until the 1980s, although she wrote her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1965. As Lorna Sage acknowledged in her obituary after Carter's premature death from cancer in 1992, "it wasn't until the eighties that readers caught up with her." Catching up, and keeping up, with Carter's vibrant and turbulent imagination is a task well worth undertaking. Now acknowledged as one of Britain's foremost late 20th-century writers, whose work regularly appears on university reading lists and is popular material for Ph.D. theses, Carter's writing still retains the ability to shock and surprise, to make us see the world differently and dramatically (Marx, 2001, pp.87).

Despite her early success, Carter's writing remained relatively unknown during the 1970s, as she published the novels The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977). Carter's work is deliberately revisionist, taking on and debunking myths and tales, and always challenging expectations. In the speculative dystopian world of The Passion of New Eve, Evelyn becomes Eve at the hands of a terrifying, many-breasted mother figure. Questioning notions of gender, mythology, and genre, Carter presents a fantastic, postmodern, and grotesque fiction. This impulse continues in The Bloody Chamber (1979), her second collection of short stories, which takes on traditional fairy tales, already endlessly rewritten, and re-presents them with gothic, feminist, and overtly sexual elements (e.g., "Puss-in-Boots"). In "The Company of Wolves," Red Riding Hood and the wolf become highly sexualized characters, developing aspects implicit in the original tales, and the girl becomes an active participant in her fate, though the ending of this story is controversial, as some critics see Red Riding Hood as complicit in her own rape (Lim, 1997, pp. 216-29).

Nights at the Circus

Nights at the Circus (1984) see Fevvers, a fin de siècle aerialist and possessor of real (or are they?) wings since puberty, move from a childhood in a whorehouse through a series of adventures that lead her to the Siberian woodland. It is the voice and sheer womanliness of Fevvers, an eel-pie-eating Winged Victory, that dominates this novel, and she is linked by critics such as Aidan Day with the figure of Jeanne Duval in the title story of Black Venus (1985), a collection that brings together stories Carter published between 1977 and 1982 and continues Carter's revision of myth and ...