Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Angela Carter's Fairy Tales

Angela Carter¿s interest in the fairy tale genre began with her reading and translation of Charles Perrault¿s "Histoires ou contes du temps passé" in 1977 and resulted in her collection of revisited fairy tales The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories in 1979. The purpose of this research is to analyse Carter¿s deconstruction and reconstruction of the literary fairy tale genre, which originates with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French writers such as Charles Perrault and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont or the nineteenth-century German writers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The aim is to examine Carter¿s modifications and new constructs of the genre and the role of women in the genre through a selection of eight tales from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories as well as one tale from her last story collection American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993).