"'All the éclat of a new era about to take off': Angela Carter's Neo-Victorian Decadence in Nights at the Circus (1984)"

This paper considers Angela Carter’s engagement with the late-nineteenth century in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus through the lens of neo-Victorian decadence and in parallel with the writer’s ongoing reflection on femininity and gender roles, as she articulated it in her non-fiction throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The main focus is on fin de siècle imagery and its subsequent revisions in feminist art and thought, in the light of the concept of crossmapping, which looks beyond intertextuality, and can thus account for Carter’s complex interweaving of images and texts across two different epochs, that she both constructed as decadent.