Bard College ART HISTORY and VISUAL CULTURE PROGRAM

Posted on October 21st, 2014

Vitrine Displays

The Infernal Desire Machine of Angela Carter

The Infernal Desire Machine of Angela Carter: Selections from the Bradford Morrow Collection

Angela Carter (1940-1992) was one of the most prolific and innovative writers of her time.  In his introduction to her collected stories, Burning Your Boats, Carter’s friend Salman Rushdie deemed her work “by turns formal and outrageous, exotic and demotic, exquisite and coarse, precious and raunchy, fabulist and socialist, purple and black.”  Born Angela Olive Stalker, she was raised in Yorkshire, England and attended high school in south London where she began writing at an early age, first as a journalist and soon thereafter as a fiction writer, essayist, translator, and dramatist.  Indeed, her first book, Unicorn, was published as a mimeographed pamphlet just after Carter’s sixteenth birthday in May, 1966.  Among her best-known works are Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (written while she lived in Japan), The Magic Toyshop, Love, Nights at the Circus, Wise Children, Black Venus (published in America as Saints and Strangers), the groundbreaking study The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, and her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber.  A pioneering feminist writer and brilliant re-inventor of classic fables and fairy tales, Angela Carter, whose untimely death of lung cancer cut short a burgeoning career, is now widely considered one of the most influential British authors of the second half of the twentieth century.

Monday, October 20- Friday, December 5, 2014
Stevenson Library Atrium

Opening Reception: Monday, October 27th, 4:30-6:00 pm