‘The nature of flesh, which is to say, the world’ Reading Sex in the Angela Carter Papers
This article seeks to recognise autofictional and autotheoretical
impulses at play in the writings of Angela Carter (1940-1992). In
particular, it presents a reading of Carter’s short story Flesh and
the Mirror, first published in 1974, alongside archival materials held
by the British Library. Carter’s archives reveal new dimensions to
her feminist materialist practice, and her intriguing capacity to draw
on her own erotic life as the basis for short fiction and philosophical
speculation. This article suggests that sexuality is vital to Carter’s
work in ways more intimate than has previously been presumed.
Ultimately, it urges the value of the feeling body more broadly in
archival work.