MAGIC REALISM IN ANGELA CARTER'S NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS

This article examines the deployment of magic realism in Angela Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus (1984), focusing on how Carter overlays the supernatural or uncanny onto late-Victorian/turn-of-the-century settings to challenge norms of gender, identity, and narrative authority. Carter’s use of mythic inversion, narrative ambiguity, and literalization of the fantastic destabilizes the boundary between the “real” and the “imaginary,” enabling her feminist critique of patriarchal structures and the ideology of realism itself. Through close reading of key episodes (Fevvers’s hatching, the train derailment, narrative control struggles), the article argues that Carter’s magical realism is not escapist but heavily political: it reimagines what bodies, voices, and spectacle can achieve in a world resistant to transformation.