Contemporary women's writing: Carter's literary legacy

Abstract

While acknowledging Carter's substantial influence on writers of both sexes, the chapter examines Carter's particular legacy for women writers and assesses her unique place in the canon of contemporary women's writing. It argues that Carter's work provides a model for subsequent generations of women writers in which politics and poetics are combined in a radical writing practice. In particular, Carter's work has licensed the confident conflation of fantasy and realism, the subversion of gender and sexual norms and a linguistic playfulness and excess that may be seen in the work of women writers who have published since the 1980s including Jeanette Winterson, Kate Atkinson, Sarah Waters and Ali Smit