Saturday, May 30, 2015

In the Era of the Easy Feminist Fairy-Tale Remix, Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ Is More Vital Than Ever

In the Era of the Easy Feminist Fairy-Tale Remix, Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber' Is More Vital Than Ever

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I was worried about re-reading The Bloody Chamber, the late British writer Angela Carter’s most famous work, a collection of short stories based on the Western fairy-tale canon that Penguin Classics has just released in a deluxe edition to commemorate what would have been the author’s 75th birthday. 
Originally published in 1979, it preceded the recent wave of fairy-tale remixing by roughly three decades, and I feared that the Internet’s endless Disney Princess variations might have robbed Carter’s stories of the potency they possessed when I first read them, over a decade ago. 
Specifically, would the insistently feminist tone of so much contemporary reappropriation render The Bloody Chamber‘s own celebrated view of gender in our culture’s most cherished bedtime stories too obvious to be thrilling? … Read More

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