Transformative Change in Western Thought

This groundbreaking volume maps the shifting place and function of marvelous transformations from antiquity to the present day. Shape-shifting, taking animal bodies, miracles, transubstantiation, alchemy, and mutation recur and echo throughout ancient and modern writing and thinking and continue in science fiction today as tales of gene-splicing and hybridisation. The idea of metamorphosis lies in uneasy coexistence with orderly world views and it is often cast out, or attributed to enemies. Augustine and the church fathers consider shape-shifting ungodly; Enlightenment thinkers suppress alchemy as unscientific; genetically-modified wheat and stem-cell research are stigmatised as unnatural. Yet the very possibility of radical transformation inspires hope just as it frightens. A provocative, theorising, trans-historical history, this book ranges across classics, literature, history, philosophy, theology and anthropology. From Homer and Ovid to Proust and H. P. Lovecraft and through figures from Proteus to Kafka's Fly and toSpiderman, four historical surveys are combined with nine case studies to show the malleable, yet persistent, presence of transformation throughout Western cultural history.

Inhalt
General Introduction: Metamorphosis: A Phenomenology Antiquity and Archetypes: Introduction to Part I 1. The Transformations of Ovid's Medea (Metamorphoses vii. 1-424) 2. Lynx-stone and Coral: 'Liquid Rocks' between Natural History and Myths of Transformation 3. Proteus and Protean Epic: From Homer to Nonnos 4. Arboreal Myths: Dryadic Transformations, Children's Literature, and Fantastic Trees Christianity and Classicizing: Introduction to Part II 5. Of Donkeys and D(a)emons: Metamorphosis and the Literary Imagination from Apuleius to Augustine 6. Adonis as Citrus Tree: Humanist Transformations of an Ancient Myth 7. Defacing God's Work: Metamorphosis and the 'Mimicall Asse' in the Age of Shakespeare 8. Phantastica Mutatio: Johann Weyer's Critique of the Imagination as a Principle of Natural Metamorphosis Science: From the 'Post-Metamorphic' to the Posthuman: Introduction to Part III 9. Our Mind Is the Ancient Proteus': Proust, the Poets, and the Sea 10. Horror in a Covered Platter': H. P. Lovecraft and the Transformation of Petronius 11. Transforming the Experience of War in the Fiction of Marcel Aymé, René Barjavel and Michel Tournier 12. The Parabola Paradox: Transformation and Science Fiction 13. Epilogue

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