The Bristol Festival of Ideas is following in the footsteps of OGOM: Company of Wolves and is hosting an evening celebrating the life, work and legacy of Angela Carter on May 18th. Carter began her writing career in Bristol. During the event Sir Christopher Frayling will talk about Angela’s work in the 1970s, his memories of her, and reflect on how she has been interpreted since her death by readers, academics, film-makers and others. Other participants include Susannah Clapp, Carter’s literary executor, who has recently published a memoir of her friend, based on a series of postcards Carter sent to her. Also appearing at the event is Bidisha, who referred to Clapp’s book and her attempt to write her own tribute to Carter in her blog earlier this year, and Charlotte Crofts from UWE who has written about Carter and made a film inspired by her work. There is also an afternoon devoted to her TV work and a showing of Company of Wolves.
OGOM will be publishing a Company of Wolves book with Manchester University Press which contains much of the exciting research showcased at the conference. We were first with this of course….watch this space!
Carter is just marvellous. One of the most important English writers of the twentieth century, I think. I’m working on a chapter for the Company of Wolves book, provisionally called ‘”The price of flesh is love”: Commodification, corporeality, and amatory utopianism in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber‘; I’m hoping to present it as a conference paper at the University of Cardiff’s Fantasies of Contemporary Culture event in May, too. So I’ve been reading some very good critical material on The Bloody Chamber; these two are very inspiring:
Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998).
Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere, Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter’s Translational Poetics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013).
And, of course, there’s this:
Christopher Frayling, Inside the Bloody Chamber: On Angela Carter, the Gothic, and Other Weird Tales (London: Oberon Books, 2015).