caa a22 4500 378883739 CHVBK 20180305123437.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20040323xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/ANGL.2003.351 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/ANGL.2003.351 Hegerfeldt Anne Greifswald The Stars that Spring from Bastardising: Wise Children Go for Shakespeare [Elektronische Daten] [Anne Hegerfeldt] Angela Carter's last novel, Wise Children (1991), critically examines traditional concepts of family and culture and reveals how they function as instruments of domination and exclusion. Relying on notions of legitimate vs. illegitimate and ‘high' vs. ‘low', both concepts are used to uphold an existing hierarchy. In a close reading, this essay analyses how Carter's novel deconstructs these binary oppositions, replacing them with less exclusive conceptions of family and culture. Allegorically applying them to Britain as a whole, the novel promotes a vision of a non-hierarchical, pluralistic society. In revealing how binary oppositions and hierarchies are constructs propagated by those in power, Wise Children pursues an agenda similar to that of many postmodern and postcolonial theoretical texts, which might conveniently have been taken as a starting point for the discussion. This essay, however, eschewing the usual approach of mapping literature onto a chosen theoretical background, gives precedence to the fictional text, treating it as an argument in its own right. Understood not as an illustration of, but as a complement to theory, fiction is regarded as an effective means of intellectual inquiry which may illuminate social and political issues from an independent and rewarding perspective. © Max Niemeyer Verlage GmbH, Tübingen 2003 Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 121/3(2004-03-23), 351-372 0340-5222 121:3<351 2004 121 ANGL https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2003.351 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2003.351 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Hegerfeldt Anne Greifswald NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 121/3(2004-03-23), 351-372 0340-5222 121:3<351 2004 121 ANGL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter