By reading key Carter texts alongside their Decadent intertexts, Tonkin interrogates the claim that Carter was in thrall to a fetishistic aesthetic antithetical to her feminism. Through historical contextualization of the woman-as-doll, muse and femme fatale, Tonkin tests Carter's own description of her fiction as a form of literary criticism.
'Maggie Tonkin's Angela Carter and Decadence makes a significant contribution to 'second-wave' Carter criticism twenty years after the writer's untimely death...the book explores a relatively neglected area in Carter criticism, considers a wide range of literary and non-literary sources, and makes a strong case for a reconsideration and reconciliation of the author's poetics and politics.' - Gramarye