This study discusses Angela Carter's fiction in chronological order, and notes that although her themes are fairly consistent throughout her work, consistency of theme is not the same as repetition. The angles and emphases that develop are partly from Carter's immersion in the changing intellectual debates of the times and, concurrently, arise from the reading she was doing at the different stages of her life, which stretched from the medieval through de Sade to Foucault. The text describes theoretical arguments on the Enlightenment, modernity, feminism and postmodernism.