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Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Clarendon Lectures in English)

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Clarendon Lectures in English)

by Marina Warner (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2002

    $33.38
Synopsis

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 evocation 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 Hieronymus 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.

$33.38

Quantity

1 in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 284
 Edition: illustrated edition
 Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 10 Oct 2002
ISBN 10: 0198187262
ISBN 13: 9780198187264

Media Reviews
... this irresistibly styled and splendidly illustrated treatment of generation, evolution, growth, and decay touches most of the mythological - and many of the literary-artistic - bases, but goes beyond them to encompass photography, cultural anthropology, folklore, and lepidoptery ... Strongly recommended. Virginia Quarterly Review Arcane information for its own sake isn't Warner's game, nor is art-historical sleuthing, though both contribute to the fine-grained pleasures of this book. James Lasdun, London Review of Books A sprightly, imaginative, playful, fabulously informed public meditation on change, mutating, hatching, splitting, doubling and carrying on. New York Times The book will allow the slower reader more time to digest that range (dazzling), as well as the piercing, playful use of ideas ... (the book) is in love with complicated but deeply suggestive and often beautiful ideas that have flowered violently in the last 100 years. New York Times Book Review ... an erudite work of cultural history that generously acknowledges debts to a vast community of scholars Times Higher Education Supplement Warner moves with a high-wire walker's assurance, from Ovid, Bosch and Dante to James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. New York Times Warner is a modern Renaissance woman, at ease in a multi-disciplinary world of art, literature, and science. Independent Magazine Warner's method of invoking these myths is deft and dextrous. Independent Magazine In this zest for the random fruit of research, Renaissance syncretism, nurturing new variants of ancient tales, produced a delicious, organised chaos. This is close to the yolky, juicy, sappy and fructifying cornucopia on which Warner feats her readers. Independent Magazine Her supple, humorous and warm style wears its scholarship lightly. Independent Magazine The continued power of ancient mythology to shape art and writing is illuminated with all [Warner's] usual postmodern pyrotechnical brilliance. Donald Lee, Art Newspaper Marina Warner's greatest talent is perhaps her ability to spot cultural preoccupations long before they become part of the zeitgeist. Amanda Craig, The Times Warner's gift is for inspired juxapostition. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds is less an argument than a magic lantern show that takes us from Caribbean creation myths all the way to the personal demons of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. David Jays, Observer Who but Warner could have written with such elegance and brilliance on our continuing need for fairytales. Amanda Craig, The Times
Author Bio

Marina Warner is a prize-winning novelist, cultural historian, and critic. Her most recent novel is The Leto Bundle. Among her acclaimed non-fiction works are From the Beast to the Blonde and No Go the Bogeyman. She lives in London.