Leonor Fini, La Leçon de Botanique (detail), 1974, oil on canvas

Angela Carter and Surrealism by Anna Watz 

Caleb Sivyer

March 2, 2017

Anna Watz. Angela Carter and Surrealism: A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.

 Scholarly work on Angela Carter has grown enormously since her untimely death in 1992. While a number of introductions to her work appeared throughout the 1990s, such as Sarah Gamble’s Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (1997) and Aidan Day’s Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (1998), more recent studies have focused on particular aspects of her work or have sought to unpack the broad range of literary and non-literary influences. Edited volumes such as Rebecca Munford’s Re-Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts (2006), and Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips’ Angela Carter: New Critical Readings (2012) have opened up the field of Carter studies by shedding light on the way that she appropriated material from the past.1 As Carter herself put it, “I feel free to loot and rummage in an official past, specifically a literary past, but I like painting and sculptures and the movies and folklore and heresies, too.”2 One thing that Carter “looted” was surrealism, and this aspect of her work has, until now, gone largely unacknowledged. As Anna Watz argues in Angela Carter and Surrealism: A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic, surrealism has only ever been considered a “marginal influence on Carter’s writing,” something which her book addresses by conducting a comprehensive and engaging study of the way that surrealism permeates Carter’s writing project.3