Metamorphoses of the Werewolf
Metamorphoses of the Werewolf

Author: Leslie A. Sconduto

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0786452161

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The mythical werewolf is known for its sudden transformation under the full moon, but the creature also underwent a narrative evolution through the centuries, from bloodthirsty creature to hero. Beginning with The Epic of Gilgamesh, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and an account in Petronius' Satyricon, the book analyzes the context that created the traditional image of the werewolf as a savage beast. The Catholic Church's response to the popular belief in werewolves and medieval literature's sympathetic depiction of the werewolf as victim are presented to support the idea of the werewolf as a complex and varied cultural symbol. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance
Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance

Author: Susan Wiseman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-04-24

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1107041651

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Susan Wiseman analyses mythical and natural creatures in English Renaissance writing, including Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.

The Modern Literary Werewolf
The Modern Literary Werewolf

Author: Brent A. Stypczynski

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2013-05-11

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1476603545

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Throughout history, from at least as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, mankind has shown a fascination with physical transformation--especially that of humans into animals. Tales of such transformations appear in every culture across the course of history. They have been featured in the Western world in the work of such authors as Ovid, Petronius, Marie de France, Saint Augustine, Jack Williamson, Charles de Lint, Charaline Harris, Terry Pratchett, and J. K. Rowling. This book approaches werewolves as representations of a proposed shape-shifter archetype, examining, with reference to earlier sources, how and why the archetype has been employed in modern literature. Although the archetype is in a state of flux by its very definition, many common threads are linked throughout the literary landscape even as modern authors add, modify, and reinvent characteristics and meanings. This is especially true in the work of such authors examined in this book, many of whom have struck a chord with a wide range of readers and non-readers around the world. They seem to have tapped into something that affects their audiences on a subconscious level.

She-wolf
She-wolf

Author: Hannah Priest

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-07-30

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 071909819X

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She-wolf explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. The book includes contributors from various disciplines, and offers a cross-period, interdisciplinary exploration of a perennially popular cultural production. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day with chapters on folklore, history, witch trials, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and gaming. Considering issues such as religious and social contexts, colonialism, constructions of racial and gendered identities, corporeality and subjectivity – as well as female body hair, sexuality and violence – She-wolf reveals the varied ways in which the female werewolf is a manifestation of complex cultural anxieties, as well as a site of continued fascination.

Metamorphosis and Identity
Metamorphosis and Identity

Author: Caroline Walker Bynum

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2001-05-06

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13:

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An exploration of the roles of metamorphosis and hybridity in the establishment of personal identity, with particular emphasis on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The four studies in this book center on the Western obsession with the nature of personal identity. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with an eye toward antiquity and the present, Caroline Walker Bynum explores the themes of metamorphosis and hybridity in genres ranging from poetry, folktales, and miracle collections to scholastic theology, devotional treatises, and works of natural philosophy. She argues that the obsession with boundary-crossing and otherness was an effort to delineate nature's regularities and to establish a strong sense of personal identity, extending even beyond the grave. She examines historical figures such as Marie de France, Gerald of Wales, Bernard Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante, as well as modern fabulists such as Angela Carter, as examples of solutions to the perennial question of how the individual can both change and remain constant. Addressing the fundamental question for historians--that of change--Bynum also explores the nature of history writing itself.

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic
Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic

Author:

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2017-09-15

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1786831031

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Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic. This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.

Phases of the Moon
Phases of the Moon

Author: Craig Ian Mann

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-09-21

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1474441130

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Provides the first academic monograph dedicated to developing a cultural understanding of the werewolf film.

In the Skin of a Beast
In the Skin of a Beast

Author: Peggy McCracken

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-05-17

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 022645908X

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In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.

Ovid on Screen
Ovid on Screen

Author: Martin M. Winkler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-30

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1108485405

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The first study of Ovid, especially his Metamorphoses, as inherently visual literature, explaining his pervasive importance in our visual media.

Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis

Author: David Gallagher

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 9042027088

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The origins of selected instances of metamorphosis in Germanic literature are traced from their roots in Ovid's Metamorphoses, grouped roughly on an 'ascending evolutionary scale' (invertebrates, birds, animals, and mermaids). Whilst a broad range of mythological, legendary, fairytale and folktale traditions have played an appreciable part, Ovid's Metamorphoses is still an important comparative analysis and reference point for nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language narratives of transformations. Metamorphosis is most often used as an index of crisis: an existential crisis of the subject or a crisis in a society's moral, social or cultural values. Specifically selected texts for analysis include Jeremias Gotthelf's Die schwarze Spinne (1842) with the terrifying metamorphoses of Christine into a black spider, the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915), ambiguous metamorphoses in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf (1814), Hermann Hesse's Piktors Verwandlungen (1925), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988). Other mythical metamorphoses are examined in texts by Bachmann, Fouqué, Fontane, Goethe, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Thomas Mann and Wagner, and these and many others confirm that metamorphosis is used historically, scientifically, for religious purposes; to highlight identity, sexuality, a dream state, or for metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical reasons.