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Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic

Robert McKay | John Miller

(2017)

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Book Details

Abstract

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.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover Front Cover
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Contents v
Acknowledgements vii
List of Contributors ix
List of Illustrations xiii
Introduction 1
Social Anxieties 19
1. Like Father Like Son: Wolf-Men, Paternity and the Male Gothic 19
2. Wicked Wolf-Women and Shaggy Suffragettes: Lycanthropic Femmes Fatales in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras 37
3. Postcolonial Vanishings: Wolves, American Indians and Contemporary Werewolves 65
4. The Good, the Bad and the Ubernatural: The Other(ed) Werewolf in Twilight 87
5. ‘Becoming woman’/Becoming Wolf: Girl Power and the Monstrous Feminine in the Ginger Snaps Trilogy 113
Species Troubles 135
6. ‘Something that is either werewolf or vampire’: Interrogating the Lupine Nature of Bram Stoker’s Dracula 135
7. Saki, Nietzsche and the Superwolf 153
8. A Vegetarian Diet for the Were-Wolf Hunger of Capital: Leftist and Pro-animal Thought in Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris 177
9. Everybody Eats Somebody: Angela Carter’s Wolfish Ecology 203
10. ‘But by Blood No Wolf Am I’: Language and Agency, Instinct and Essence – Transcending Antinomies in Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver Series 227
11. Transforming the Big Bad Wolf: Redefining the Werewolf through Grimm and Fables 251
Index 273
Back Cover Back Cover