Feminine Freakishness: Carnivalesque Bodies in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Nov. 1, 2006

[1] Angela Carter described herself as being in the “demythologising business” (“Notes”, 38) and in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus Carter’s interrogative scope is both broad and complex. The winged aerialiste Fevvers and the rag-bag of circus freaks with whom she journeys evoke the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin...