Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay, yet it also threatens personal identity if human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation. Shape-shifting also belongs in the landscape of magic, witchcraft, and wonder, and enlivens classical mythology, early modern fairy tales and uncanny fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of essays, given as the Clarendon Lectures in English 2001, takes four dominant processes of metamorphosis: Mutating, Hatching, Splitting, and Doubling, and explores their metaphorical power in the evication of human personality. Marina Warner traces this story against a background of historical encounters with different cultures, especially with the Caribbean. Beginning with Ovid's great poem, The Metamorphoses, as the founding text of the metamorphic tradition, she takes us on a journey of exploration, into the fantastic art of Hieronymous Bosch, the legends of the Taino people, the life cycle of the butterfly, the myth of Leda and the Swan, the genealogy of the Zombie, the pantomime of Aladdin, the haunting of doppelgangers, the coming of photography, and the late fiction of Lewis Carroll.

About the Author
Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism, and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols.

Reviews
This is a beautifully produced book - a pleasure to hold and a joy to read, demanding, entertaining and many faceted. * The Brown Book (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) *
[Warner's] love of Ovid, of Shakespeare, of the Romantic poets, of Stevenson, of Lewis Carroll and Jean Rhys come shining through; titbits of information like how Frazer gathered his material for The Golden Bough - by writing to missionaries all over the world - make this very individual book a treasure trove for all who love the world of the imagination and delight in story telling. * The Brown Book (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) *
Richly associative and exhilarating...Warner runs the gamut of the Gothic, as familiar with aliens as with zombies, as curious about the Shakespearean and Coleridgean imagination as about the Blakean daemonic sprit of Philip Pullman's sensibility. * Iain Finlayson, The Times Weekend Review *


Awards
Winner of The Aby-Warburg Prize for special contributions in the fields of Art, Culture and the Humanities.



Book Information
ISBN 9780199266845
Author Marina Warner
Format Paperback
Page Count 284
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Dimensions(mm) 215mm * 137mm * 15mm