My review of Anna Watz’s Angela Carter and Surrealism: A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic has just been published by ASAP/J. As I argue there, Watz’s book has “enriched Carter scholarship immensely by giving us a more nuanced understanding of a major and until now neglected facet of Carter’s work.” Drawing on the Angela Carter archive at the British Library, in particular the manuscript of Carter’s unpublished translation of Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et sexualité, Watz helps us to see how surrealism shaped Carter’s writing, aesthetics and politics, and how Carter in turn both celebrated and critiqued surrealism throughout her career.
ASAP/J is the open-access platform of ASAP/Journal, the scholarly publication of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. As stated on their website, ASAP/J will complement ASAP/Journal’s mission “to explore new developments in post-1960s visual, media, literary, and performance arts, and to investigate how the contemporary arts confront the historicity of artistic form.”
To find out more about ASAP/J, head over to their official website here. More information about Anna Watz’s Angela Carter and Surrealism can be found at Routledge’s website.
Dr Anna Watz is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Linköping University. Her monograph Angela Carter and Surrealism: A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic is published by Routledge (2016). Watz has also published a number of articles and book chapters, on topics such as feminism, poststructuralism and surrealism. Her current research concerns representations of female desire in contemporary popular fiction, and she is currently working on a monograph entitled Paradoxical Pleasures: Female Submission in Popular and Erotic Fiction, under contract with I.B. Tauris. Her other research interests include avant-garde art and literature (in particular surrealism); the writing of Leonora Carrington; feminist theory; and the historiography of écriture féminine.
Angela Carter Online 