routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

542 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
of its major and most distinctive figures. Feminist and iconoclastic,
humorous and passionate, her writing ranges from the retelling of
fables – The Bloody Chamber (1979) – to extravagant magic realism,
in Nights at the Circus (1984); from a disturbing examination of love,
in Love (1971), to the battle between reason and emotion in The Infernal
Desire Machine of Doctor Hoffman (1972). Her novels illustrate her
range and daring, as characters change sex, grow wings, move between
reality and fantasy, and explore beyond the range of normal human
experience. Her short stories were collected posthumously in Burning
Your Boats (1995). Like many of her contemporaries, Angela Carter
looked back to the traditions which inform all storytelling, and rewrote
the history of our own times in her own style.
The note of continuity is the triumph of the writer in the face of
eternity. Literature is the triumph of the imagination. As such, it will
only die if or when imagination dies. In a novel of only seven-and-ahalf
short pages, Samuel Beckett takes us to that furthest extreme: the
title of the novel, published in 1965, is expressed in the last three
words of the opening sentence:
No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there,
imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine.