On The Intertextuality Of Nights At The Circus By Angela Carter

Angela Carter is a preeminent contemporary British novelist, famous for her feminist magical realism and her appropriation of various literary genres and styles. Although Nights at the Circus (2001) is one of her later work, it has attracted the attention of the public and the critics and won James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and has been hailed as a return to a new peak in her literature career. However, few people has done detailed research on it so far. The present thesis focuses on Carter’s masterpiece, Nights at the Circus, and analyzes the intertextuality in this novel. Analyzing from the perspectives of the recontextualization of history, intertextual strategies and her examination of cultural discourse, the present thesis attempts to explore and interpret Carter’s profound meditation on history, human society and women as individuals.The thesis consists of three chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. The first part is a brief introduction to the author and her works, a summary of Nights at the Circus and literature review at home and abroad, which is followed by an overview of various theories on intertextuality in a bid to set the theoretical framework of this thesis. The main body includes three chapters, interpreting in detail Carter’s intertextual representation in her writing. Chapter one attempts to examine how Angela Carter decontextualizes and then re-contextualizes the historical events in Victorian age and historical figures as texts in Nights at the Circus. Chapter two focuses on the use of intertextual strategies in the novel. By analyzing the appropriation of the old myths, fairy tales and the adaptation of gothic novels, Carter has rethought the role of these literary works and their repercussions and relevance to contemporary life. Chapter three discusses how Angela Carter alludes to and reexamines the cultural discourses of gender, identity and the carnival as fossilized in the course of civilization with reference to other cultural texts.To conclude, in this novel, Carter subverts the traditional female identity and gender relationships by adopting the strategies of appropriation and adaptation. She has successfully expressed her critical thinking on relationship between man and woman, power relations, myths and science.