In this chapter, we focus on multilingualism and language contact, moving away from the strong focus on monolingualism characteristic of many traditional approaches to language history, and discussing various onsets, scenarios and outcomes of language contact. We introduce the concepts of borrowing and imposition as central constructs to understand contact-induced change in language, illustrating and critically examining these ideas in three case studies: the development of loanwords in Canadian French, Germanic substrate effects in the formation of American Englishes and mixed-language business writing in medieval Britain after the Norman Conquest. Building on these cases, we discuss which elements of the language can be transferred and explore possible pathways of social diffusion of borrowings, as well touching upon various traits and examples of code switching and similar multilingual practices in historical texts. Finally, we evaluate the constructs of pidgin and creole languages, discussing to what extent they can be seen as different in structural terms, or whether their distinctiveness arises primarily from the sociohistorical circumstances from which they arose.

Wolves have always generated strong emotions of admiration and fear in people. For some they are revered as powerful hunters while they are reviled by others as intruding and unwanted predators. A general theme in this chapter is that the behaviour of wolves, particularly their hunting and predation, is not simply regarded as a natural and necessary part of their social ecology, but it is construed, and differently perceived, by different groups of people, as a moral ecology, and the human judgements of that ecology construct wolves. A specific theme in the chapter will be how the werewolf emerged, and was given shape, from concerns about wolves themselves.

The contemporary artist Marcus Coates is well known for a series of performances in which he imitates non-human animals. The combination of humour and a makeshift aesthetic have become somewhat of a trademark in these so-called ‘becoming animal’ works, as well as in socially engaged performances where the artist uses these ‘becoming’ skills to assume the role of the shaman. Although the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari positioned imitation as an ineffective means of becoming-animal, as has already been well rehearsed, this strategy remains key to Coates’s attempts to understand the world from alternative perspectives – especially those of non-human animals. In stark visual contrast to this body of work, Coates’s monochrome sculptural installations Platonic Spirit: Running Grey Wolf (2012) and All the Grey Animals (2012) comprise formal arrangements of grey prisms in the gallery space. Reminiscent of early minimalist works, they initially appear to be a far cry from the artist’s performances. This chapter examines how human–animal relations are articulated through encounters with these installations, speculating on why the wolf was represented in a stand-alone sculpture and considering these works in the context of Coates’s interest in becoming-animal.

Whilst the vampire has experienced an enormous resurgence in film, television and fiction in recent years, the werewolf is represented rather like a familiar or loyal canine accompanying a more powerful master. Not only does this monster carry second billing, an interesting permutation is the community status of the monster, frequently placed in a subordinate social class, relegated to the equivalent of a kennel rather than a castle. This chapter explores this lesser position of the werewolf in three particular works. First, in 1941’s The Wolf Man, despite his role as a man who ‘is pure at heart and says his prayers at night’, Lon Chaney Jr’s portrayal of Larry Talbot as a lumbering, expatriated-to-America prodigal son of a Welsh grandee posits him as a poor relation clearly out of his depth. In the Twilight series, the Native American shapeshifter, Jacob Black, lives on the reservation and cannot compete with the effete Cullen family. Finally, the notion of American Southern white/trailer trash permeates Charlaine Harris’s novels, and True Blood portrays the wolf packs as crude boondocks residents. Rather like the misrepresented wolves currently being reintroduced in various wilderness locations, these filmic werewolves are equally unwanted and undermined.

This chapter investigates the relationship, in reality, folktale, literature and popular culture, between wolves and untruth, in various forms. From the fables of Aesop to the cartoons of Disney, the use of the wolf as a metaphor for deception is long and appears deeply engrained in the human psyche. Basing an understanding of this metaphor on the fundamental nature of the animal appears at first sound, but starts to crumble when we appreciate that different cultures have not universally viewed the wolf in wholly negative terms of a ravenous, malevolent predator. Since the wolf appears frequently in hoax stories about feral children, the chapter goes on to study the very validity of the ‘wild child’ and concludes by discussing the obverse of the negative accounts of the wolf’s ‘wildness’. That this beast is free and natural thus appeals to some as a token for a missing link between ourselves and the natural world, which we have largely left behind us.

Twentieth-century werewolves, with their monthly transformations, violent outbursts and sudden sprouting of hair, have become a ready metaphor for adolescence in popular culture. Teen Wolf (Rod Daniel, 1985) encapsulates the connection between teenager and lycanthrope. Concentrating on Maggie Stiefvater’s Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy (2009–2011) and Annette Curtis Klaus’s Blood and Chocolate (1997), this chapter unis the assumption at the core of this metaphor: that teenagers, like werewolves, are animalistic and, moreover, that the wolf is lesser to the ‘were’. Thus, to use the language of the Gothic, both werewolves and adolescents are made liminal in this structure. By looking at the teenage werewolf from the point of view of the wolf, the author looks to address the lower status of the animal and return the wolf’s voice.

In many fairy tales and folktales, wolves and witches are villains that lead the protagonists into the dark realm of the forest to commit crimes with impunity. However, in the Russian folktale ‘Tsarevich Ivan and the Grey Wolf’, the wolf and the witch become figures of salvation, aiding the heroes and heroines in their quest, while the forest itself, although ruled by the super-natural, becomes a respite from the cruelty of human nature and civilisation. In the forest, the Grey Wolf provides Ivan with wise counsel, escape and resurrection from death. And when events are outside his power, the Grey Wolf directs Ivan to the only other equally powerful being in the forest – the witch Baba Yaga. Although the Russian taiga, or boreal forest, is a wild and liminal space, it, along with its inhabitants (Baba Yaga, the Grey Wolf and the Leshii, or forest spirits who take the form of wolves), offers the only hope of survival for the fairy tale protagonists. If the hero or heroine are to survive, they must go into the forest and place themselves into the paws of the wolf or the ancient hands of Baba Yaga, seeking wild sanctuary to survive.

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is full of metamorphoses, between animal and human, but also of texts. Variants on the same tales and themes allow her to examine the same problems in various ways from different angles. ‘Red Riding Hood’, the wolf and the werewolf are central motifs. This chapter analyses how Carter’s tales depict flesh (usually female) as in the marketplace. Flesh is commodified, but exchange value becomes transformed into use value (that is, following Marx, its sensuous particularity is restored) through her miraculous metamorphoses. There is a vision of utopian mutuality in desire, emancipated and enhanced by immersion into the non-human – a liberation not only from patriarchy but also from the capitalist commodification of those bodies. She initiates the generic hybridity of present-day paranormal romance, where the monster of traditional Gothic becomes a sympathetic lover, forming an architext for the new genre of paranormal romance. The transformations of fairy tale that Carter pioneered work on prior ‘horizons of expectation’ and form one of the devices of that genre. Carter intermodulates genres to create a form that looks back to questions first raised in the Enlightenment about what humanity is and our relation to nature and animality, and bequeathing her explorations to her successors.

Given the intertextual tendencies of the franchise, it is perhaps surprising to find that, applying a narrow definition, the werewolf has featured only twice in the BBC television series Doctor Who: once in the form of the punk shapeshifter Mags in ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’ (1988–9), then again in that of the foundling host of ‘Tooth and Claw’ (2006). If, however, the genus is approached in a more inclusive spirit, these examples are soon joined by other contenders: the Primords of ‘Inferno’ (1970), for instance, and the Lukoser from the ‘Mindwarp’ episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord (1986). Looking beyond televised stories to the novels published by Virgin and the BBC, the audio dramas produced by Big Finish and comic strips featured in the Doctor Who magazines, it becomes clear that the Whovian werewolf pack is much bigger than it first appears. In exploring some of the ways in which the folkloric hybrid has been adapted to the mythos of Doctor Who at various times and in multiple formats through a period of more than half a century, this chapter is able to comment on the wider cultural adaptability and significance of the werewolf and its primal cousins.

This chapter looks at culture itself and how its foundations in and departure from wolfish nature are problematised by the wild children so frequently associated with wolves. The sound of wolves is commonly associated with unsettling, uncanny or sublime moments in literature and film but we can see a contrary depiction in Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Life after Death’. Here, the empathic and consoling nature of the wolves’ cry is emphasised in a moment of absolute grief. Hughes is seeking solace in the notion that wolves and other animals can become surrogate parents to orphaned human children. Wolf-children in Romantic-period poetry, where notions of native innocence prevail, are examined, drawing on poems by Wordsworth and Mary Robinson. The representation of such children is examined in relation to Locke’s tabula rasa theory and Rousseau’s lost ‘state of nature’. Whilst the eighteenth-century wild children Victor of Aveyron and Peter the Wild Boy remain largely mute, literature constructs a history for these children through repeated storytelling. The Rousseauvian ideal of the child of nature is often undermined in such accounts but there is ambiguity too. Abandonment can be seen as a blessing: the child inhabits an animal world, a gap is bridged and something once lost is redisied through narrative.