Awards

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

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780199266845

Table of Contents

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

`Review from previous edition 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 `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, Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and on to Nabokov's Lolita and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. In addition, she makes several seductive moves toward that enormous threat to intellectual history, the movies[?], as if well aware that when it comes to mutating, hatching, splitting and doubling (her chosen topics on which metamorphosis works) the large screen, its savage if magical cuts and lingering dissolves, are what you might call the cat's whiskers ... Especially when looking at Bosch, Warner sees something like fluency in the rampant, exhilarating way forms can find new shapes. This is Warner at her playful best.' New York Times Book Review `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 `Who but Warner could have written with such elegance and brilliance on our continuing need for fairytales.' Amanda Craig, The Times `It would be good to have this wise woman as our guide as we chose which of Hieronymous Bosch's versions to make real.' 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 triology.' David Jays, Observer `What makes Fantastic Metamorphoses remarkable is its dashing investigation of imagination.' David Jays, Observer `Her gift, whether in her works of fiction or non-fiction, has been to give shape and credibility to myth and fairy tale, showing how this world of the fantastical connects 3ith the patterns and routines of everyday existence.' Fiona Maddocks, Evening Standard `Warner's book uses a bewildering array of different works of art and literature to illustrate her taxonomy of metamorphosis.' David Honigmann, Financial Times

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

Author Information

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.

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