‘Cthonic Gravity’: Exploring Angela Carter's Gothic Side
Angela Carter's work often featured Gothic or fantastical aspects, celebrating strangeness or unsettling normality. This talk will explore the darker side of her writings.
The English author Angela Carter (1940–1992) was known for her richly imaginative and subversive writing, which blended elements of feminism, magic realism, and Gothic. She is particularly celebrated for her postmodern reworkings of traditional folk and fairy tales, most notably in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of dark, sensual stories that reimagine classic stories through a feminist lens. Her later novel Nights at the Circus (1984) gives us the story of Fevvers, a winged aerialist whose ambiguous nature blurs the line between myth and reality.
Carter's work frequently explores the uncanny by revealing the latent violence and sexuality beneath familiar narratives. Her stories challenge conventional notions of gender and power, transforming archetypal characters into complex, often ambiguous figures. Through her vivid prose and radical reinterpretations, Carter reshaped the boundaries of fantasy and folklore in modern literature.
Your speaker for this event will be Dr Jacob Huntley, a Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His research interests include the Gothic tradition, horror fiction, and the evolution of the ghost story. Jacob’s Zoom lecture will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
Your curator and host is the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019). Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (2024), part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
