Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature

Griffin, M.

ISBN 10: 019968698X / ISBN 13: 9780199686988

Published by Oxford University Press, 2015

About this Item

This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside.This book has hardback covers. In good all round condition. No dust jacket. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item,550grams, ISBN:9780199686988.

Seller Inventory # 8696725

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019968698X
• ISBN 13: 9780199686988
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 550 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • French Language & Literature

About this title

Synopsis

Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death--these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.

About the Author

After a comprehensive education in Wiltshire, Miranda Griffin completed her undergraduate and graduate education at Cambridge. She has taught in Cambridge, London, and Oxford; and has been a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge since 2007. Her first book, The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle was published by Legenda in 2005.