British writer Angela Carter described herself as a feminist, yet her fiction scandalized many feminists. With their frequent depictions of sexual violence and women as fetishized objects on display, Carter's novels and short stories referenced many misogynistic male-authored texts from the literary canon, particularly from the tradition of European Decadence. Through a series of juxtaposed readings of Carter's fictions alongside the canonical texts to which she alludes, and a discussion of the critical debates surrounding these texts, Angela Carter and Decadence offers a re-examination of Carter's writing practice. Individual chapters examine her intertextual allusions to Hoffmann, Proust, Poe, Baudelaire and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, with sections on the representation of Woman as doll, Muse and femme fatale. Through its scrutiny of Carter's claim that her fiction is a form of literary criticism, this study contributes forcefully to contemporary scholarly debates about feminism, aesthetics and postmodernist writing practices.