Discover Angela Carter’s classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales interwoven by a master of seductive, luminous storytelling. From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories. ‘Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality’ Ian McEwan ‘A quirky, original, and baroque stylist’ Margaret Atwood Featuring an introduction from award-winning short story writer Helen Simpson

For the 75th anniversary of her birth, a Deluxe Edition of the master of the literary supernatural’s most celebrated book—featuring a new introduction by Kelly Link Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber—which includes the story that is the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves—she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From familiar fairy tales and legends -- Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires, werewolves -- Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: The British writer Angela Carter got famous for her short stories and her examination of "The Sadeian Woman". In her writing she often deals with sexuality and power. The story "The Bloody Chamber" is one of ten short stories in Angela Carter’s collection "The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories", which was published in 1979. In this particular story she reworks the fairy tale of Blue Beard and transforms it into a feminist retelling by combining it with results from "The Sadeian Woman". With this work she wants “not simply to point out what is wrong with conventional representations of gender; she is concerned at once to offer different representations, different models” (Day 134). Thus her short stories are full of variety and different topics and take place in a Gothic atmosphere. Carter herself claimed that she followed a realism because she wanted to fulfill the desire of the people to believe the word as fact (Day 134). Therefore she uses topics which are familiar to everybody. Sexuality in a wider sense is one of the predominant ones in her stories. It shows a “sexuality that is situated beyond cultural borders and might therefore be more ‘natural’ than the conventional notions of sexual identity” (Gruss 212). However, the sexuality in "The Bloody Chamber" often seems strange, abhorrent and even disgusting. Thus, especially the sexuality serves to create a Gothic atmosphere by the help of different means. In the following paper I want to examine how this is done by use of three Gothic concepts: The haunting, abject and grotesque, and the uncanny.

Leading cultural historian and broadcaster Christopher Frayling reflects on gothic themes in literature, art and popular culture, through the lens of his friendship and correspondence with Angela Carter during her formative ‘Bath years’, during which she wrote most of her key works; The Bloody Chamber, The Sadeian Woman, The Passion of New Eve. Inside the Bloody Chamber collects Frayling’s articles, essays and lectures written since then on various aspects of the Gothic—several in hard-to-find places, many never published before, but all revised for this new book. The subjects match Angela’s interests, are mirrored in the stories within The Bloody Chamber—and mesh with his memories of their time together in Bath in the 1970s.