Angela Carter's death in 1992 heralded a surge of popularity and tributes. These latter tended to cast her as a "fairy godmother" or "white witch", labels which this thesis takes as starting points in its examination of the roles of author, narrator, hero, environment and reader; their interchangeability; and mutual affect. It focuses on the construction of the subject and her or his environment in Carter's fiction, measuring their interaction by way of generic filters, criticism, interviews and journalism. The introduction examines Carter's strategies and agenda within this context by way of a historical exploration of the Western subject's perception of her/his surroundings, with particular regard to the postmodern and feminist viewpoints. This is followed by an account of Carter's own publishing history envisaged as a landscaped, picaresque journey which typifies her characteristic blend of idealism and pragmatics. Her juxtaposition of the fantastical with the familiar continues to resurface as part of the debate in subsequent chapters, which use a succession of literary and cultural tools to illumine her texts in the light of the main project. Thus: her short fictions, radio plays and the film The Company of Wolves are examined as fairy tales; The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villainsexplored using theories of the Gothic and the dystopia; Love and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman assessed in light of pornography and the picaresque; The Passion of New Eve viewed in terms of constructions of gender; and Nights at the Circus and Wise Children seen alongside theories carnival and of time. Elements of film theory, urban studies and architecture are threaded throughout, and some conclusions are offered through a reading of the important tropes of dream and labyrinth in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. Always, subversive and unpredictable, Carter's writing can nevertheless be viewed as a succession of rewritings depicting an evolution of a subject initially vulnerable to but ultimately able to manipulate history. This is signalled most clearly by the early figure of the witch-hysteric. She is gradually transformed into the sibyl-prophetess of the later texts, while in a parallel dynamic, the environment's external threatening constructions have been dismantled in favour of a self-fashioning world full of possibility.