The Grotesque in Angela Carter’s “Burning Your Boats”

• Main Authors: Min-Ching Huang, 黃敏菁
• Other Authors: Tzu- Chang Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/73162066596233315519

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 語文與創作學系碩士班 === 99 === This study uses grotesque aesthetics to discuss the twentieth century British writer Angela Carter's (1940-1992) short story collection Burning Your Boats, which gathers all of Carter's forty-two short stories from 1962 to 1992. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The introductory chapter presents Carter's life, writing style and the book itself, and reviews how scholars worldwide define and characterize the term "grotesque". Later, the motivation for this study is explained and the literature related to the book is reviewed. The second, third and fourth chapters applies the forms and features of grotesque and the spirit of aesthetics to explore the inconsistency, carnival, and allegory in this book. In the second chapter, we analyze how Carter distorts the content by embellishing the splendid manner of the language and by creating a constantly splitting and moving narrative, making the surface of the stories look uneasy and inconsistent. As to the third chapter, we explain how Carter sees language as an object and deliberately breaks the language system and cross-language symbols, and then reconstructs it to create an internal structure of two-dimensional values: conflict and coexistence, and the space for multilingual dialogue. The fourth chapter combines the findings from the second and third chapters, revealing the main theme of this book: an individual living in a social network cannot free oneself from the constraints of the authoritative and materialized world of black allegory. The final chapter redefines the grotesque aesthetics through the study of this book and pinpoints the similarities and differences of grotesque aesthetics between the mid-twentieth century and earlier times, and relocates Carter as an active distinctive writer in the mid-twentieth century according to her uniqueness and importance.