Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance

Taking Ovid's Metamorphoses as its starting point, this book analyses fantastic creatures including werewolves, bear-children and dragons in English literature from the Reformation to the late seventeenth century. Susan Wiseman tracks the idea of transformation through classical, literary, sacred, physiological, folkloric and ethnographic texts. Under modern disciplinary protocols these areas of writing are kept apart, but this study shows that in the Renaissance they were woven together by shared resources, frames of knowledge and readers. Drawing on a rich collection of critical and historical studies and key philosophical texts including Descartes' Meditations, Wiseman outlines the importance of metamorphosis as a significant literary mode. Her examples range from canonical literature, including Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, to Thomas Browne on dragons, together with popular material, arguing that the seventeenth century is marked by concentration on the potential of the human, and the world, to change or be changed.

• Argues the importance of metamorphosis as a significant imaginative literary mode, situating literary texts in relation to social, cultural and visual material
• In addition to providing fruitful new analysis of canonical texts including A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, the book also responds to discussions in the growing area of animal studies
• Focuses on literature, but also discusses a broad range of popular texts and new sources, providing readers with a new way of approaching metamorphosis, rather than dealing exclusively with highly literary texts