Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance(English, Hardcover, Wiseman Susan)

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Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance(English, Hardcover, Wiseman Susan) is written by Wiseman Susan and published by Cambridge University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1107041651 (ISBN 10) and 9781107041653 (ISBN 13).

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.