‘The nature of flesh, which is to say, the world’: Reading Sex in the Angela Carter Papers

Abstract

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.