The Bloody Chamber is a brilliant and disturbing series of short stories. It has puzzled and delighted critics in equal measure. All the stories use themes and ideas from famous fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and Be The Bloody Chamber is a brilliant and disturbing series of short stories. It has puzzled and delighted critics in equal measure. All the stories use themes and ideas from famous fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast, but Angela Carter uses them to create what feels, in each case, like a brand-new world. In doing so, says the critic Marina Warner, Carter “made an inspired, marvellous move”; she neither rejected nor denounced fairy tales but instead embraced them, “and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life”.
Contents
A summary of the stories
What is Carter trying to achieve in The Bloody Chamber?
What kind of world does Carter create in the book?
How radical is The Bloody Chamber?
Where does The Bloody Chamber fit into literary tradition?
Notes
Jack Zipes
Five Facts about Angela Carter & The Bloody Chamber
Postmodernism
Transgression
Fairy Tales
A Short Chronology
Further Reading