The Guardian's Blog, page 203

Walks Round Red Brick gets a fresh face - and some red colouring at last

A classic study of hidden architecture is republished - including its author's adventure in a Leeds shrubbery where he was mistaken for a thief

Leeds University is too little known to many of the local citizens, who pass the Parkinson Building with its student-decorated flight of grand steps and think to themselves: that's it.

Far from it. Behind the grandeur of the formal buildings along Woodhouse Lane lies an entire chunk of Georgian and Victorian Leeds, colonised by the academics and later adorned with some very fine Brutalist architecture, if you admit of such a bracketing of adjectives.

Professor Maurice Beresford was the great expert on this, perhaps the best modern historian of Leeds and certainly a supporter of 'town and gowning'. Although his chair was in economic history which may sound boring – the 'dismal science' and all that – he was a sprightly figure and a great investigator of his surroundings, accompanied by his mongrel dogs Lulu and Sheba.

The 'Prof with the Dog' was his nickname, especially when in 1977 he embarked on describing and illustrating a series of walks around the university campus, the very area which is so little-explored by the 'town' element of Leeds. Descriptions and photographs appeared fortnightly in the uni's house magazine, a Dickensian deadline system which added to the immediacy of his already readable prose. They were so popular that they were collected into a book, Walks Round Red Brick, which nicely coupled the landscape with the generic term for late 19th century and early 20th century universities.

The coining of this term (and 'Oxbridge') by Professor Edgar Allison Peers of Liverpool University, whose pseudonym on academic books of Bruce Truscott was only revealed after his death, is one of the many small treasures unearthed in Beresford's wanderings. For all his official discipline, he was a classic field archaeologist, though reluctant to use the title, for which he sought an alternative in vain. As he complained:

'Field' sounds like the countryside and 'archaeologist' sounds antique.

His survey area in Leeds was both urban and recent.

Beresford's book has now been republished with additional walks and landscape updates by Christopher Hammond and photographer Ruth Baumberg whose colour pictures have one merit denied to Beresford's original. You can actually see the red. This appears not only in handsome terraces which may come as an eye-opener to those who doubt the existence of such grace and proportion in the city, but in the backside of stone monuments such as the Parkinson Building and Brotherton Library.

Published by the Thoresby Society, named after Leeds' most celebrated historian, and the Leeds Phil & Lit, the book leaves the enjoyable character of Beresford's writing intact, including his account of

One Sunday afternoon when a post-doctoral research fellow threatened to send for the police on seeing the author in his shrubbery. 'You're no professor, you're a thief!' was the reaction to a hurried explanation.

The image is comparable to those conjured up in another modern classic of the city's landscape which the Phil & Lit has also republished: The Building Stone Heritage of Leeds, in which two Leeds University geologists trace the quarries of every type of stone used in the city centre, including the Travertine marble at Macdonald's and the three grades of Wharfe valley sandstone at Starbucks.

Both books are published by Jeremy Mills of Huddersfield and you can get them at local bookshops or via the company's online bookshop here.

LeedsUniversity of LeedsLeeds Metropolitan UniversityArchitectureArchaeologyHistoryUniversity guideUniversity of LiverpoolMartin Wainwright
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Chinua Achebe: leader of a generation

The Nigerian writer's redefinition of colonialism gave his people the sense they were no longer alone in their predicament

To Nelson Mandela, he was the writer "in whose company the prison walls fell down". To Nadine Gordimer, a fellow Nobel laureate, he was simply "the father of African literature".

The death of Chinua Achebe marks a significant moment in the evolution of literature in the English language, possibly the point at which it has begun to leave behind the bitterness of empire.

Achebe was a great African, but his life and work, from Things Fall Apart (1958) to Anthills of the Savannah (1987), was a long struggle to define himself as an Igbo writer from eastern Nigeria who could somehow find self-expression in the language and culture of a colonial power.

From the seeds of his example hundreds of African literary flowers have bloomed. To a writer such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Achebe's vigorous redefinition of colonialism is less a battle plan than a legacy.

It is perhaps the measure of the change that Achebe helped to bring in his lifetime that much of his career reads like history: born in a British colony; educated as a Christian; recruited by the Nigerian Broadcasting Service; published by William Heinemann; acclaimed by the British literary establishment; caused a storm by denouncing Joseph Conrad for racism in Heart of Darkness. The Nobel prize many expected, and thought his due, did not arrive in time.

Achebe was the leader of a generation, one that includes Wole Soyinka\ and VS Naipaul, that grew up in the dying days of the British Empire. For such writers, the inevitable engagement with the English language was fraught with difficulty.

This CV was acknowledged in the title of Achebe's essays, The Education of a British-Produced Child, but it often got him into trouble with nationalist radicals. Yet, despite his refusal to reject English, Achebe emerged as the essential literary champion of Africa to the wider world.

To millions of readers, he conveyed what colonial oppression meant – in the language of the oppressor. It was a medium that Achebe's unique style, spare, simple and straightforward, made his own.

Through many vicissitudes, including the Biafran civil war of 1967-70, Achebe sustained an enviable artistic serenity. He once said: "I would be quite satisfied if my novels did no more than teach [African] readers that their past was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans, acting on God's behalf, delivered them."

Today, with much of Africa, north and south, a dynamic part of global society, that struggle and those ambitions are like something from another age. But Achebe's unique achievement is timeless and inspiring: he found his voice in his own way and used it to bring his world to the attention of the wider world. At the same time, in Nigeria, he gave his people the hope of broader recognition, the special sense peculiar to the written word that they were no longer alone in their predicament.

To many readers, he was a beacon; to writers everywhere a rare example. He once said – in words that should be nailed in letters of fire over the doors of creative writing classes – that "everything is grist to the mill of the artist."

To the end of his life, he was content with his oeuvre: five volumes of fiction, plus essays, poetry and some stories for children. Achebe's wisdom and modesty were a nice antidote to the antics of literary society in some of the richer parts of the English speaking world.

Chinua AchebeFictionRobert McCrum
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Why ebooks are a different genre from print

The differences in format are beginning to change the nature of what we're reading, and how we do it

Most readers, I think, will by now have seen the "Medieval Helpdesk" sketch from Norweigan TV, where an exasperated monk requires assistance to start working with a new-fangled and daunting "book". It's fun – if loopily anachronistic, the codex having been around since the 1st century AD. But it does rest on a presumption that I'm increasingly beginning to question: that technological changes to the way we read affect only the secondary, cosmetic and non-essential aspects of reading. There is a kind of bookish dualism at work. The text is the soul, and the book – or scroll, or vellum, or clay tablet or knotted rope in the case of quipu – is the perishable body. In this way of thinking, the ebook is the book, only unshackled from paper, ink and stitching. If the debate about the ebook is to move on from nostalgic raptures over smell and rampant gadget-fetishism, it's time to think about the real fundamentals.

There are two aspects to the ebook that seem to me profoundly to alter the relationship between the reader and the text. With the book, the reader's relationship to the text is private, and the book is continuous over space, time and reader. Neither of these propositions is necessarily the case with the ebook.

The ebook gathers a great deal of information about our reading habits: when we start to read, when we stop, how quickly or slowly we read, when we skip pages, when we re-read, what we choose to highlight, what we choose to read next. For a critic like Franco Moretti, the author of Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, this data is priceless. For publishers, it might very well come with a price tag. What would publishers do with the data? If 50% of readers stopped reading your postmodernist thriller at page 98, the publisher might recommend that for Version 2.0, the plot twist on page 110 be brought forward. While the book's relationship to the reader is one of privacy, with the ebook we are all part of an unacknowledged focus group. Would the small codices containing The Gospel of St John or Tom Paine's Rights Of Man have had the impact they did if each and every reader were known before they had opened the first page?

This segues into my second contention. China Miéville, at last year's Edinburgh World Writers' Conference, raised the idea of "guerrilla editors" – readers remaking the text, much in the manner of the fan reaction to The Phantom Menace, The Phantom Edit. As Jaron Lanier argues in his new book Who Owns The Future? the largest digital companies compile huge amounts of information on our likes, dislikes, economic activity, preferences, attention spans and such like. What happens when this information is recycled into the "reader-specific" book? Such things have existed in a rudimentary format – my parents bought my youngest brother a book when he was about five, where the central character was also called "Gordon" and the house he lived in was in a village called "Lilliesleaf": the ur-text behind it would have run something like "Once upon a time a [boy/girl] called lived in a place called ". I can imagine the same phenomenon now on a vastly more sophisticated scale: an EL James-esque book where, based on my digital trace, Christian listens to Alban Berg not Thomas Tallis and Anastasia's doctorate is on Christine Brooke-Rose not Thomas Hardy. It could even change over time: in this hypothetical book, the characters shop in Lidl. When I go back to reading it, after receiving an advance for my next book, they suddenly shop in Waitrose. What this means is that when I say to a friend "Have you read such-and-such a book?", even if they answer "yes", the real answer may be "not exactly".

Robert Darnton, the director of the University Library at Harvard is a kind of glorious bibliographical fundamentalist: in The Case For Books he shows, elegantly, that it's not good enough for Google to digitise one of each book; for any intellectual rigour they need to digitise every edition (the old "every First Folio is unique" argument). It is certainly true that there are subtle differences in reading Tom Jones in different editions – the 1749 The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, in Four Volumes is a different experience from a Penguin Classic (and very different again from the softcore porn of The Illustrated Tom Jones (Anderson 144). But the differences might best be compared to hearing Beethoven's 9th Symphony as conducted by Karajan and as conducted by Roger Norrington. The printed book – the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction par excellence – is astonishingly stable over time, place and reader.

The book, seen this way, is a radically egalitarian proposition compared to the ebook. The book treats every reader the same way. It manages to balance the solipsism of reception and interpretation with a communal, agreed space in which those interpretations can be discussed.

Once these features of privacy and continuity are acknowledged, the ebook might well come into its own. Could the e-reader support texts that could be read only if more than one person were reading it – and what issues of trust might that raise? Or that could only be read at specific times and in specific places? Could there be texts that no one reader has access to in their entirety, and if so, what communities of interpretation might grow up around them? (In this case, TV and film are far ahead of publishers; with things like the ARG The Lost Experience – a video game based on the programme Lost – and the Batman-centred "Why So Serious?" campaign.)

Realising the specific nature of the book ought to make us more considerate of what the form does achieve, and could well unsettle the ebook into being more daring. It wouldn't be a book, but it might be something as yet unthought.

EbooksStuart Kelly
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What is the best contemporary novel you've read in translation?

Open thread: Read anything good in translation recently? Give us your recommendations

Walk into any bookshop in mainland Europe and you are sure to find shelves stacked with literature from all over the world. Stroll into any high street bookshop in the UK, however, and your choices will be somewhat more limited. Forget Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and William Boyd, let's make space for Marie Darrieussecq, Javier Marías and Jenny Erpenbeck …

I've just read Marías' All Souls, which combines wit and satire in retelling the author's experiences as a teacher in Oxford. Offering a Spanish perspective on the antiquated, often-beguiling rituals of dons and high-table dinners, this novel put a smile on my face.

Any more suggestions of novels in translation?

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Can you spot a Charles Dickens sentence?

A new study claims that Dickens and 'the worst writer in history' are indistinguishable. That's just plain silly

The Daily Mail reports with incredulity the news that a study has "found that people really are none the wiser about whether they're reading a Charles Dickens masterpiece or one of the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, billed as 'the worst writer in history'." This irritated me, on many levels, and I looked into it.

Here's the study, printed in the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, and the details, from author Mikhail Simkin. Basically, he put a quiz online – you can take it here – in which he asked participants to guess whether an extract was from Dickens or Bulwer-Lytton.

"The average score is about 50%, which is on the level of random guessing. This suggests that the quality of Dickens's prose is the same as of that of Bulwer-Lytton," Simkin finds. You can read the study in its entirety here. Simkin concludes: "I began this paper with the question: Are famous writers different from their obscure colleagues? The answer is: Yes, they have more readers."

My first irritation is with the assumption that Bulwer-Lytton is the worst writer in history. This is just ludicrous. Yes, there might be the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which participants compete to write the worst opening sentence to a novel possible, in honour of the eye-wateringly convoluted first sentence of his novel Paul Clifford: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

But there was more to Bulwer-Lytton than this one sentence. I spoke to a descendant of his a few years ago, and he was keen to defend the writer's honour, telling me: "He was a remarkable man and it's rather unfair" that the competition was named after him "for entirely the wrong reasons. He was a great champion of the arts, and made such a huge difference to people in all walks of life … he was politician, writer, playwright and philosopher." He also pointed out that being the first person "to have penned a cliché was a mark of genius", adding that as well giving us the over-used phrase "a dark and stormy night" Bulwer-Lytton also invented the sayings "the pen is mightier than the sword", "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar".

Now, I haven't read Bulwer-Lytton, and I'd be keen to hear from those of you who have. But I very much doubt he's the worst writer in history. There are many stronger contenders for that title.

My second irritation is the assumption that the quality of an author can be judged on an extracted sentence. I find others are in agreement with me here: "The study also assumes that if Dickens is a 'genius', every line of his prose should be 'genius'. It's a false analogy to presume that genius is like a pie; ie, if a pie is a pumpkin pie, every bite will taste like pumpkin pie. Genius is nothing like pie. If you've ever read the first half of A Tale of Two Cities, which is confusing and desperately in need of revision, you'll know better."

This unnamed professor of literature who criticises the study also points out that the joy of Dickens isn't really in his prose - it's in the characters he creates, and in his stories.

But quibbles aside, do let me know how you did on Simkin's quiz (I got 67% – beat that!). And taking his theme on, here's one I've done myself, featuring the great man alongside some other authors. All of these sentences have been published. Which is Dickens?

"I have wanted you for so long now," he said roughly, "I've no memory of how it feels to be devoid of the craving. But you must know what you do. I need you to think of who you are and where you are and who I am."

"You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me."

"Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"

"I'm here, and I love you. I have always loved you, and I will always love you. I was thinking of you, seeing your face in my mind, every second that I was away. When I told you that I didn't want you, it was the very blackest kind of blasphemy."

"I have become my own island state. A ravaged, war-torn land where nothing grows and the horizons are bleak."

Charles DickensFictionAlison Flood
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Poem of the week: Bird on a Briar by Anonymous

Whether sacred, profane – or both – the mystery of this poem remains immediately appealing some 700 years on

This week's poem is among the earliest surviving English love lyrics. "Bird on a Briar" or, in Middle English, "Bryd one Brere", is an enchanting little song, anonymous, of course, but with an extra mystery attached to its provenance. It was written on the back of a papal bull, at least a hundred years after the bull had been issued by Pope Innocent III in 1199. The scribe was probably a monk at the Priory of St James, near Exeter. Whether he transcribed a secular poem on a holy and ancient document as an act of mischief, piety or sheer carelessness, we'll probably never know: we don't even know for certain the poem is secular.

As often with texts from this period, the variant spellings raise another question: was the scribe aiming for a particular effect or set of effects? For "bird" we have "bryd", "brid" and "biryd". As the word changes shape, it seems to mirror the quick, flickering movement of the bird. All the bird-words are more onomatopoeic than the modern English "bird", thanks to the audibility of the "r". The two-syllable "biryd" is a bird-call in itself. Even the elision of "on a" to "one" in the first line sharpens our sense of the bird's singularity and special-ness.

The "bird" is usually taken to represent a young woman. Lines two and three reinforce the metaphor: translated, they read "Blissful bird, take pity on me/ Or dig, love, dig thou for me my grave." Again, a spelling-shift enriches the text for the modern reader: "greyth" contains "grey" and therefore hints at the lover's decline into age, while "greith" suggests more the physical grappling of the spade with the earth. If we pick up a hint of "leaf" from "lef" (love) an autumnal tone appears in the initially bright and lively scene.

The mood soon picks up. "Brihit" means "bright" and, again, a double-syllable adds jauntiness, and an echo of the "biryd" itself. There is such delight and anticipation in this stanza. The alliteration of "hic" and "hende" adds to the effect, and joins the speaker and the object of his love in the verbal dance. Now "bryd one brere" is abbreviated to "brid on brere," as if speeding the thought to its conclusion.

That second stanza culminates in a vision: "She is white of limb, lovely, true/ She is fair and flower of all." Secular and sacred poems were frequently cross-bred in the middle ages, and one possible interpretation of the lyric is that it's a prayer to St Bride or Saint Brighid. The poet is asking pity of a saint rather than a bird, feathered or otherwise The saint fits the description "fair, and flower of all", and might account for the choice of a papal bull as note-paper. A straightforward interpretation of the poem as a prayer seems contradicted by the next stanza and its first line, "Mikt ic hire at wille haven" ("Might I have her at my will… "). On the other hand, perhaps the metaphor continues, and it's the spiritual possession of a divine presence that is alluded to. "Haven" might mean "have" but looks very much like "heaven", after all.

The word "hende" is variously translated. The link above gives "handsome one", while Luminarium favours "handmaid". The handmaid might be a servant, unobtrusively attending to her lord or lady in the great hall, flitting about like the bird on the briar. She might conceivably be the Virgin Mary, the briar itself representing the Crown of Thorns.

The second and third stanzas share the little half-line refrain, "loveli, trewe", differently positioned and changing emphasis. The qualities seem physical in the second stanza, and moral in the third: being lovely and true here are connected with being "Stedefast of love". "Trewe", of course, echoes and embodies the "rewe" of the third line.

There's certainly a note of redemption at the end, though at first it's difficult to get a modern tongue around the line, "Jouye and blisse were were me new". The first "were" is the conditional, "would", and the second means, and I think should be pronounced, "wear". The poet is talking about renewal, and not about the past.

Love song, prayer or a cunning weave of both, "Bryd one Brere" still feels freshly minted. There's the irregular, dancing rhythm, the open-heartedness, and the simplicity of imagery. And, of course, there's the spelling. "Bryd one Brere" sings from the page (the papal bull, to be precise). It belongs to a time when poetry was an oral art. Transcription was a new skill: writing was thought untrustworthy, and made a lot of people hot and bothered, as online publishing does today. Reading the poem in the original spelling, we can see English words and grammar in their infancy, still not quite ready to grow up and settle down. They seem like living organisms at this stage, shape-changing, unsettled, and difficult to catch as birds.

Bird on a Briar

Bryd one brere, brid, brid one brere,
Kynd is come of love, love to crave
Blythful biryd, on me thu rewe
Or greyth, lef, greith thu me my grave.

Hic am so blithe, so bryhit, brid on brere,
Quan I se that hende in halle:
Yhe is whit of lime, loveli, trewe
Yhe is fayr and flur of alle.

Mikte ic hire at wille haven,
Stedefast of love, loveli, trewe,
Of mi sorwe yhe may me saven
Ioye and blisse were were me newe.

Translation
Bird on a briar, bird, bird on a briar,
We come from love, and love we crave,
Blissful bird, have pity on me,
Or dig, love, dig for me my grave.

I am so blithe, so bright, bird on briar
When I see that handmaid in the hall:
She is white-limbed, lovely, true,
She is fair, and the flower of all.

Might I have her at my will,
Steadfast of love, lovely, true,
She may save me from my sorrow;
Joy and bliss would wear me new.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Chinua Achebe: Twitter pays tribute

As news broke of Achebe's death, readers took to Twitter to pay tribute. Here we gather together a selection of their responses

The novelist @tejucole tweeted:

"Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it."—Chinua Achebe.

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 22, 2013

The poet Njeri Wangari who tweets as @Kenyanpoet, started the hashtag #InterestingAchebeFacts in tribute:

#InterestingAchebeFacts did you know he is the one who discovered our very own #NgugiWaThiongo getting #WeepNotChild published #ChinuaAchebe

— Mbugua's Sister (@Kenyanpoet) March 22, 2013

The Nelson Mandela Centre for Memory in South Africa, which tweets under the handle, @NelsonMandela, said:

The #Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory sends condolences on the passing of Prof. Chinua Achebe, tinyurl.com/d5svarl

— NelsonMandela (@NelsonMandela) March 22, 2013

Actor and member of The Roots, Tariq Trotter, known as @blackthought on Twitter, paid tribute to Achebe:

Novelist, poet, essayist, influence Chinua Achebe has passed away. I'm so glad to have met him. RIP, live on through the legacy of your work

— black thought (@blackthought) March 22, 2013

@GilesCoren tweeted:

Chinua Achebe is dead. He was a giant. Anthills of the Savannah was the first African novel I read. Like Orwell but funnier. Read it now.

— Giles Coren (@gilescoren) March 22, 2013

Author @realjohngreen added his voice to the huge number of tweets that started pouring in when Achebe's death was confirmed:

The great Chinua Achebe has died. m.guardiannews.com/books/2013/mar…

— John Green (@realjohngreen) March 22, 2013

@EgeonuWrites tweeted about Achebe the professor and critic:

The world mourns the death of Prof. Chinua Achebe. Nigeria Govt will bask in the relief from a determined critic. #ChinuaAchebe

— Egeonu Writes(@EgeonuWrites) March 22, 2013

Author @Tracy_Chevalier said:

Things Fall Apart. RIP Chinua Achebe. bbc.co.uk/news/world-afr…

— Tracy Chevalier (@Tracy_Chevalier) March 22, 2013

@laurenbeukes, author of Zoo City and Moxyland also tweeted:

Very sad to hear that Chinua Achebe has died.

— Lauren Beukes (@laurenbeukes) March 22, 2013

If you'd like to pay tribute or leave a comment, you can do so on our news story.

Chinua Achebe
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A brief survey of the short story part 48: Angela Carter

By harnessing the peculiar power of fairytales, Carter invested her stories with a vibrant emotional and intellectual energy

In an interview Angela Carter gave in 1991, not long before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, she can be heard struggling with being called an "English writer". She was the least English of English writers, a postmodernist with no interest in social realism. Aside from Shakespeare, Defoe and Blake, her influences came from Europe and the new world: Poe and Melville, the symbolists and surrealists, Borges, Calvino and Joyce.

A writer of great range, she was perfectly capable of describing, as she did in The Quilt Maker (1981), "south London on a spring morning. Lorries fart and splutter along the Wandsworth Road. Capital Radio is braying from an upper window." But she preferred to delve into myth and legend, and the extreme psychic landscapes of "forsaken castles, haunted forests" and "forbidden sexual objects".

A fragment of fairytale glimmers in Carter's earliest work, The Man Who Loved a Double Bass (1962), where an inanimate object is treated as though alive, and helmets tucked beneath motorbikes gleam "whitely, like mushrooms or new laid eggs". In her first collection, Fireworks (1974), the seam thickens discernibly. The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter is a savage piece of incest-themed gothic; in the Ballardian Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest, a menacing magic begins to unfold after a girl is pricked (in fact, bitten) by a flower; in Reflections, a rambler arrives at "a short, crumbling flight of steps that led to a weathered front door, ajar like the door of a witch's house".

In 1979, two years after translating a selection of Perrault's fairytales, Carter published The Bloody Chamber, a series of "revisionings" of some of the best-known fairytales, including Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast. The book is a supremely well-achieved critique and reformulation of stories that have been shaped by our society, and which shape it in turn. In the 1970s, myth and folklore was coming under fresh scrutiny in numerous ways – Bruno Bettelheim's Freudian reading in The Uses of Enchantment, Ann Sexton's poetry cycle Transformations, the incisive critiques of Jack Zipes – but nowhere is the strange, warped power of the originals harnessed so strikingly as in Carter's work.

By retelling these tales, wrote Lorna Sage, Carter was "deliberately drawing them out of shape … The monsters and the princesses lose their places in the old script, and cross forbidden boundary lines." In The Tiger's Bride, the beauty sheds her skin to reveal "beautiful fur". In The Company of Wolves, Red Riding Hood uses sexual pleasure – hers and his – to tame the wolf.

Alongside these inversions are stories in which the hidden content of fairytales is made explicit. In the title story, a redaction of Bluebeard, the narrator realises by her husband's gaze – "the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh" – that his lust will consume her, while in The Erl-King the objectified beloved discovers that "[t]here are some eyes can eat you". Carter told an interviewer in 1985: "I was using the latent content of those traditional stories, and that latent content is violently sexual."

Light is shed on The Bloody Chamber by another book Carter published in 1979, The Sadeian Woman, which argues that the two versions of the feminine De Sade presents – Justine, the victim, and Juliette, the victimiser – are both wholly male constructs, "and neither pays any heed to a future in which might lie a synthesis of their modes of behaviour, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both thought and feeling".

As Margaret Atwood writes: "The Bloody Chamber can be understood much better as an exploration of the narrative possibilities of De Sade's lamb-and-tiger dichotomy than as a 'standard' work of early-70s to-the-barricades feminism." At the time, Carter's nuanced position – as well as her assertion that women could be simultaneously attracted to and revolted by the predatory male – left her isolated. The New York Times labelled her "a rigid ideologue, fervidly feminist" while Andrea Dworkin dismissed The Sadeian Woman as "a pseudofeminist literary essay". To journalist Amanda Sebestyen, she was no less than the "high priestess of postgraduate porn".

Alongside an abiding fascination with folklore, in her last two collections, Black Venus (1985) and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993), Carter developed an interest in impressionistic biographies of historical figures, including Baudelaire's lover Jeanne Duval and Edgar Allan Poe. Most indelible of these is The Fall River Axe Murders (1987), her study of the allegedly murderous New England spinster Lizzie Borden. Here, the discord between Carter's forensic tone and fairytale details – a wicked stepmother who "oppressed her like a spell'; the detail that virginal Lizzie is menstruating on the day of the murders; talk of slaughtered pet pigeons baked in a pie – instils a heavy, malign tension. Carter, wickedly and perfectly, breaks off her account moments before chaos is unleashed, the story left like a blood blister about to burst.

Borden may be a dark expression of the empowered feminine, but for Carter that is preferable to what she called the "zomboid creatures in Joan Didion's novels", or the "dippy dames of Jean Rhys". Carter's ideal heroines possess sharp wits and "a certain cussedness, a bloodymindedness", as with the Moll Flanderseque protagonist of Our Lady of the Massacre (1979). In The Company of Wolves, just as the wolf is about to strike, his supposed victim "burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat". At the climax of The Bloody Chamber, it isn't the bride's brothers who come to the rescue, as in Bluebeard, but her resourceful mother, who guns down the sword-waving, Sadeian marquis with a shot from her dead husband's service revolver (try unpicking that symbolism, if you will).

Carter's methods are too chilly and removed for some; her characters, as one reviewer suggested, more "specimens for analysis". But thick as the stories are with theory, and ascetically opposed to the enveloping pleasures of what Carter dismissively called "bourgeois realism", they nevertheless pulse with energies that trigger an emotional as well as an intellectual response. The story that best embodies this ability to bridge theory and feeling is Ashputtle or the Mother's Ghost (1987), which first takes the form of a lecture before transforming into a profoundly powerful and mysterious vision of, in Marina Warner's phrase, "dark, archaic grief".

Carter thought of narrative as "an argument stated in fictional terms", and she certainly has, as AS Byatt said of Hans Christian Andersen, "designs on the reader". But any successful work of art must generate meanings beyond those it intends, and Carter's best work opens on to a territory that stretches far beyond her immediate aims. Even if we were living in a postfeminist utopia (and the recent Vida report on gender prejudice shows we're not, even in the liberal enclave of book pages and literary journals), these stories would remain as vivid as fresh blood on white snow.

Next: Guy de Maupassant

Angela CarterShort storiesFictionChris Power
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James Herbert: the schoolboy's secret | Hari Kunzru

There was only one writer who mattered to me and my friends at the age of 11 – and that was James Herbert. However, The Dark was the first and the last of his books that I read

James Herbert died this week. I'll say this for him: he gave me one of the more intense reading experiences of my life. When I was 11, my tastes were more or less fixed on SF and fantasy, with an occasional foray into the yellowing thrillers (Arthur Hailey, Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean) to be found on the shelves in the spare bedroom. At school, though, there was only one writer who counted, and that was James Herbert.

Boys who generally showed no interest in books were furtively passing round copies of The Rats and The Dark, marking particularly grotesque passages, quoting them to each other with the same mix of disgust and fascination the girls (I later learned) were getting from the goldfish scene in Shirley Conran's Lace. I was (still am) a sensitive child, who tended to take things to heart, and, in general, I avoided horror novels, but I didn't want to be left out.

The Dark was supposed to be about an ancient malignant evil. I knew about that from The Lord of the Rings. How bad could it be? Very bad indeed, as it turned out. The Dark is a force, a visible evil miasma, the type of thing that came easily to English imaginations before the clean air act. It makes people do terrible, often sexually violent, things. We'd just moved into an old house, which had been owned by an elderly lady. My room had no carpet. The bulb in the ceiling light flickered. I had no paranormal investigators to help me fight. I succumbed to a state of abject terror … I did finish it, but I had to do it by daylight, in cheerful communal places, mostly the living room. I never read another.

HorrorFictionHari Kunzru
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The Rest Is Noise festival explores American literature 1900-1950

The Southbank Centre's festival of music turns its thoughts to the great American writers of the early 20th-century. Who would you include on an ideal programme? Better talk quickly …

This weekend, our friends at The Rest Is Noise festival have set themselves the mighty task of looking at America between 1900 and 1950. Has there been a more productive and fertile 50 years in the cultural history of any nation? Never mind one that barely existed just three generations earlier … Where to start? Where to end?

In the first episode of his wonderful America TV series Alistair Cooke recalled: "You know, when I told an old southerner, a friend of mine, that I was going to try to tell my version of American history in 13 hours, he said: 'Better talk fast boy.'" The Rest Is Noise festival organisers have sensibly dodged that challenge by going for a few interesting moments (in among a great riot of jazz and Broadway musicals elsewhere on the programme). The historian Hugh Brogan will be giving an overview of the upheavals and convulsions during this incredible period. Dorothy Parker will be getting a mention (who would dare leave her out?), poet John Stammers will be talking about punctuation's enemy, ee cummings, while another poet, Oli Hazzard, will discuss the great modernist Wallace Stevens. In a talk on the American city, academic Fiona Anderson will look at the writing of Hart Crane and – of course – John Dos Passos.

That all sounds great – although, inevitably, is as notable for what it leaves out as what it includes. I'm not going to make my own attempt at super-fast talking here. A short blog is an even trickier place to try to cram 50 years than a busy weekend. But the temptation to start reeling off a few favourites from that fertile period is too strong to resist. So too is the urge to put them in order. Such lists are daft and ultimately meaningless, I know. But they're also fun. So:

F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway: In Our Time
TS Eliot: The Waste Land
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer

That's five stunning books to kick things off. And if you're annoyed that there are two Hemingways on there, count yourself lucky. It was hard not to include four, and TS Eliot and Henry Miller be damned. I make no apology there, although I do regret not including John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, John Dos Passos, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, Edith Wharton, Raymond Chandler, Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles …

So can you produce a better five American novels, poems or collections of stories from the same time period? And what and who else is missing? Let us know below the line!

(And if you're wanting a few reminders of what got published when, this list of the 100 greatest American novels is pretty handy. You might also find some useful reminders in the guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds