Body Texts in the Novels of Anglea Carter: Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View

This study fills a major gap in Carter scholarship by examining the interrelations of the ideological constructions and the subversive counter-performances of bodies, texts, identity and femininity - particularly in their connection with the grotesque in Carter's final novel trilogy, "The Passion of New Eve" (1977), "Nights at the Circus" (1984) and "Wise Children" (1992). This work fills a major gap in Carter's reception and enters into dialogue with current post-semiotical theories of the embodied subject by virtue of focusing on the dynamics of the meaning-in-process concomitant with the subject-in-process (Kristeva 1985) and the body-in-process. Through a corporeal narratological method - a close-reading interfacing of semioticized bodies in the text and of the somatized text on the body - the author deciphers how the ideologically disciplined, normativized-neutralized, 'cultural' body and its repressed yet haunting transgressive, corporeal, material 'reality' (are) (de)composed(d by) the Carterian fiction's destabilizing discursive subversions and vibrations surfacing in narrative blind-spots, overwritings, textual ruptures or rhetorical manoeuvres. The terms introduced in my study, body-text, corporeal narratology, corporeagraphic metafiction, bifocal interpretive perspective, autobiografiction, feminist grotesque or self-freaking, trace a more general model for interpreting contemporary creative work by women. These share the Carterian texts characteristics by virtue of standing within a marginalized artistic tradition while subverting it internally, intertwining corporeally motivated body-texts and corporeagraphic metafictions criticizing ideological body-disciplines or canonical corpuses, and problematizing (mis)representations of self and other, as well as our mis-self-recognitions in our metamorphic, self-defacing body images.