Angela Carter (1940–1992) is on the face of it an unlikely candidate for inclusion in this volume. The perspective from which she writes, however, is a peculiar one. Stimulated by her sojourn in Japan in 1969–72 (where she claims to have become radicalised) and by travels in Australia, Asia, Europe and the United States, she adopts the ‘view from elsewhere’, seeing British culture as wonderfully strange, peculiar, exotic. In her journalism especially, she anatomises cultural detail – clothing, fashion, make-up, food, shops, politicians, pop music – with the defamiliarising eye of a poet. On one particularly involving trip, to Doncaster, she comments sardonically that ‘It's very tiring, not being alienated from your environment’ and elsewhere proclaims that ‘alienated is the only way to be, after all’. At the same time, she makes promiscuous use of European and other cultures; drawing on philosophy, fairy tales, high art, kitsch, Shakespeare and cinema, she juggles England with the rest of the world without batting an eyelid. ‘Maybe Yorkshire never really left the third World’, she writes, and compares the surroundings of Ilkley to Transylvania, Habitat stores to a caravanserai, Empire Day to the Nuremberg rally (Shaking a Leg, pp. 172, 174). Nothing is sacred: all regions and nations contribute to the cultural dressing-up box that in her view is there for the plundering.

This approach is consistent with what Carter herself described as her tendency – inherited in part from her Scottish father and Yorkshire grandmother – to be awkward, argumentative: ‘bolshy’, as she herself puts it. It also suggests a multicultural and interdisciplinary impetus. Carter's perspective is fundamentally political, emphatically and often subversively on the side of the disempowered and disenfranchised. We are, she claims, the creatures of history, from which nothing offers a refuge. She rejects essentialist notions and focuses on the forces and processes that position us in society. She seeks to subvert received truths and conventional thinking on many levels and in diverse areas. This is particularly so both in gender relations and their intersections with class and race and also in terms of the radical potential of literary and popular genres. ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles’, she says, ‘especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’