Unicórnios, virgens e erotismo: desnudando o lugar da poesia de Angela Carter

Abstract

This thesis investigates the poetic work of Angela Carter (1940-1992), a facet of her production that remains largely underexplored and often treated as a juvenile appendage to her canonical prose. The research addresses the problem of how Carter’s poetry already articulates the tactics of female subversion recognized in her prose, intertwining language (poetic elements) and content (eroticism, construction of the feminine) to create meaning. Therefore, the general objective is to analyze the strategies of female subversion in Carterian lyric poetry. This thesis posits the hypothesis that Angela Carter’s lyric poetry, far from being a secondary output, constitutes the laboratory where the author developed her project of female subversion, operating along three interdependent axes: the palimpsestic deconstruction of myth, the exploration of a pre-verbal bodily subjectivity termed here as the voice before the self, and the articulation of a political eros as a tool to reconfigure the female body and desire. The methodology combines textual and theoretical analysis of the poems from the posthumous collection Unicorn: the poetry of Angela Carter, published in 2015, grounded in feminist literary criticism and theories of eroticism, as well as medieval studies. The conclusions are developed along three argumentative axes: the first demonstrates how the central poem of this thesis, titled “Unicorn,” uses the palimpsest to subvert mythical archetypes; the second analyzes observational poems as the manifestation of the voice before the self; and the third investigates how political eros is mobilized to dismantle the fabulous beasts of patriarchy. This work stands out for its unprecedented nature in Brazil, offering the first analysis to focus exclusively on this poetic corpus of Angela Carter in the country.