Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance: 1550–1700 - Hardcover

Wiseman, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107041651 ISBN 13: 9781107041653

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

Wiseman explores the transformations of fantastic creatures including werewolves and wild children in English Renaissance writing. Analysing a variety of texts, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to court records, Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance argues that the seventeenth century is marked by concentration on the potential of the human to change or be changed.

About the Author:

Susan Wiseman is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (2006), Politics and Drama in the English Civil War (1998) and Aphra Behn (1996; 2nd edition, 2007). She has co-edited The Nice Valour for Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (2007).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1107041651
• ISBN 13: 9781107041653
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 254