Metamorphoses of the Werewolf

Metamorphoses of the Werewolf PDF Author: Leslie A. Sconduto
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786452161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
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.

Metamorphoses of the Werewolf

Metamorphoses of the Werewolf PDF Author: Leslie A. Sconduto
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786452161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Susan Wiseman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107041651
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Brent A. Stypczynski
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476603545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
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.

Metamorphosis and Identity

Metamorphosis and Identity PDF Author: Caroline Walker Bynum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
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.

Shapeshifters

Shapeshifters PDF Author: John B. Kachuba
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789140978
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
There is something about a shapeshifter—a person who can transform into an animal—that captures our imagination; that causes us to want to howl at the moon, or flit through the night like a bat. Werewolves, vampires, demons, and other weird creatures appeal to our animal nature, our “dark side,” our desire to break free of the bonds of society and proper behavior. Real or imaginary, shapeshifters lurk deep in our psyches and remain formidable cultural icons. The myths, magic, and meaning surrounding shapeshifters are brought vividly to life in John B. Kachuba’s compelling and original cultural history. Rituals in early cultures worldwide seemingly allowed shamans, sorcerers, witches, and wizards to transform at will into animals and back again. Today, there are millions of people who believe that shapeshifters walk among us and may even be world leaders. Featuring a fantastic and ghoulish array of examples from history, literature, film, TV, and computer games, Shapeshifters explores our secret desire to become something other than human.

She-wolf

She-wolf PDF Author: Hannah Priest
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 071909819X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
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.

Transforming Tales

Transforming Tales PDF Author: Miranda Griffin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191510602
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death—these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.

In the Skin of a Beast

In the Skin of a Beast PDF Author: Peggy McCracken
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645892X
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 178683104X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
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.

The Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi PDF Author: John Webster
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408138131
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
The Duchess of Malfi is one of the major tragedies of the early modern period and remains popular in the theatre as well as in the classroom. The story of the Duchess's secret marriage and the cruel revenge of her brothers has fascinated and appalled audiences for centuries. This new Arden edition offers readers a comprehensive, illustrated introduction to the play's historical, critical and performance history. The text is modernised and edited to the highest scholarly standards, with textual notes and commentary notes on the same page for ease of reference. This is the lead title in the launch of The Arden Early Modern Drama Series, a series which offers all the depth and quality of thinking long associated with the Arden. The edition will be valued by students, teachers and theatre professionals.