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. In Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, acclaimed novelist and critic Marina Warner explores the metaphorical power of metamorphoses in the
evocation of human personality. 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. Beautifully illustrated and elegantly written, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds is sure to appeal to all readers interested
in mythology, art, and literature.
Über den Autor Marina Warner
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Marina Warner's award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales include Once Upon a Time (OUP, 2014) Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (OUP, 1976; re-issued 2013), Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (Vintage, 2012), and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (Vintage, 1998). Her Clarendon Lectures Fantastic Metamorphoses; Other Worlds were published in 2001 by OUP; her essays on literature and culture were collected in Signs & Wonders (Vintage, 2000), and Phantasmagoria, a study of spirits and technology, appeared in 2006 (OUP). In 2015 she was awarded the Holberg Prize, and in 2013 she was awarded a Sheykh Zayed Prize and the Truman Capote Award. She was awarded a CBE for services to Literature in 2008. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.
