Fantastic Body Transformations in English Literature

Edited by Sabine Coelsch-Foisner. Assistant Editors: Sarah Herbe, Markus Oppolzer, Elisabeth Schober and Benjamin Wright.

24 essays, all of them in English, explore the fantastic uses to which the human body has been put in a rich variety of texts ranging from the Middle Ages via the Renaissance to Postmodernity. The individual essays are case studies, dealing with particular texts, authors, or specific kinds and features of body transformation and give an idea of the complexity of the field and the heterogeneity of the phenomena and of their aesthetic, narratological implications as well as their cultural meanings. The papers address three topical fields: I. Cultural Transformations of Body Transformations; II. Body Transformations as Sites of the Struggle for Identity; III. Body Transformations and Their Generic Implications. The contributions date back to an International Conference held 2005 in Salzburg. - The literary imagination seems to be inexhaustible as to the ways in which the human body has been transformed and deformed, twisted, fractured, and re-modelled for purposes of warning and protest, fun, shock, or horror. Re-imagining the human body in strange, alien, or non-human shapes is not only a powerful aesthetic device that lends itself to a variety of purposes, but obviously a fundamental way of coming to terms with both the limits and the possibilities of our humanity, which are themselves subject to permanent change. - Contents: Wladyslaw Witalisz: Body Transformation and Medieval Gender Politics. Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" and Gower's "Tale of Florent". - Mauro Spicci: The Dialectics of Self-Anatomy. Dissection, Bloodshed and Autoptic Visions in Shakespeare's "Macbeth". - Attila Kiss: The Semiography of the Fantastic Body. - György E. Szönyi: The Reincarnations of the Magus: Alchemy, John Dee, and Magic in Some Postmodern Historical Metafiction. - Michaela Schwarzbauer: Metamorphosis in Benjamin Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream". - Markus Niederwimmer: Body Transformations and the Transferability of Gender Attributes. Three Postmodern Gender Parodies. - Klára Bicanová: Uncanny Transformation and Marvellous Initiation. Angela Carter's Visions of Female Identity in "The Passion of New Eve". - Anna Kérchy: Angela Carter's "The Passion of New Eve". Grotesque Body Modification, Freaked Femininity and Narrative Self-Decomposition. - Arnold Leitner: Marvels and Marbles. Juno, Proserpina, and Galatea in Henry James's "The Last of the Valerii". - Suhasini Vincent-Prabakar: Hybridity, Intermingling, and Body Transformations in Salman Rushdie's Fictional Canvas. - Milada Franková: Gor and the Giant. Grotesque Bodies in Social Combat. - John Woolford: The Victorian Grotesque Body. - Christopher Smith: On The Brink with Fantasy: David Garnett's "Lady into Fox". - D. M. De Silva: Other Kingdoms: The Metamorphoses of E. M. Forster. - Gulshan Taneja: Bodies, Cyber-Bodies and the Body Snatchers. Keats and the New Technologies. - Silvia Antosa: "Soul and Body Have No Bounds". Fantastic Body Transformations in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction. - Lori Parks: A Vulnerable Body. Negotiation and Transformation through "Crash". - Ingrid von Rosenberg: From Devilish Fantasies to Cool Routine. The Boom of Cosmetic Surgery and Its Reflection in the American TV-Series "Nip/Tuck". - Pascal Nicklas: Shape-Shifting as Gothic Trope. - Mariaconcetta Costantini: Metamorphosis and Monstrosity in The Beetle by Richard Marsh. - Manika Coghen: Fantastic Transformations of the Female Body in Coleridge's "Christabel" and Keats's "Lamia". - Maristella Trulli: The Grotesque Body in Swift's Satire. "A Tale of a Tub" and "Gulliver's Travels". - Joseph Eugene Mullin: Philip Roth's "Breast". A Strange Bodily Transformation Indeed. - Benjamin Wright: J.G. Ballard's "The Crystal World". Fantasy Planet or Science-Fictional Sphere? - IX,304 Seiten mit 6 Abb., gebunden (Wissenschaft und Kunst; Vol. 4/Universitätsverlag Winter 2006)