Telling Tales about Angela Carter

Abstract

Cristina Bacchilega make a distinct addition to the growing body of scholarship available on Angela Carter, focusing productively on Carter's revisionary fairy and folk tales. Although the bulk of the essays attend to Carter's marvelous work in her classic volume The Bloody Chamber, several examine her use of the fairy tale in other venues, including her early picture books for children, her novels, and her later short-story collections. In addition to ten illuminating essays of literary criticism proper (five on The Bloody Chamber, including three on the title story), the collection provides a helpful introduction, an excellent bibliographic essay, and four moving pieces that recall or pay tribute to Carter through memoir, interview, and short fiction. A rich and briskly paced anthology that probes several veins of Carter's rich imagination, the volume originally appeared as a special issue of Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies; all the essays are reprinted verbatim except for an expansion of the introduction and the bibliographic essay. In the introduction, Roemer and Bacchilega assert that the "volume has no one thesis" (7), but within the context of a finely tuned exploration of "Angela Carter and the Literary Mirchen" (the 1996 elling Tales about Angela Cart r