Angela Carter and the politics of authorship

Furet, Marine 2021. Angela Carter and the politics of authorship. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis offers the first full-length investigation of British writer Angela Carter’s conceptualisation of her artistic career and elaboration of her writerly persona as she develops them in her published and unpublished writing. Carter’s understanding of her position as a professional writer is heavily indebted to her well-documented feminist and materialist convictions. I draw on an extensive corpus taken from Carter’s published writing – her fiction, but also her journalism – and unpublished manuscripts and personal writing to contextualise her self-positioning in the cultural field against the backdrop of the rise of media theory and late twentieth-century theories of labour and creativity. I posit that Carter’s deconstruction of the material underpinnings of authorship give texture and depth to her oft-cited credo of ‘absolute and committed materialism’. I connect familiar debates about Carter’s so-called ‘double allegiance’ to feminist ideas and to a male-dominated tradition to the less well-trodden issue of artistic autonomy, and of the problem of art’s ethical and economic value in the context of its incorporation in the marketplace. In Carter’s writings, art was a way of living as well as a means of making a living. Understanding this, I argue, provides insights into her and later women writers’ career construction, and informs current debates about the commodification of art and the links between literature, feminism, and the market.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Funders:	South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, Cardiff University
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 February 2022
Last Modified:	29 Jan 2024 15:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/147375

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