Description: Wolves are familiar figures in the Gothic imagination, creatures of pure animality that, when combined with the human in the form of the werewolf, offer powerful opportunities to explore complicated anxieties surrounding difference. This is the first volume that deals with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television, and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America, and Australia.
Brief description: John Miller is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Sheffield, UK, and the author of Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction.
Review Quotes: "This is an excellent collection, addressing one of the limits of the human as represented in the Gothic, namely the recurring theme of 'becoming wolf'. The essays assume a wide variety of perspectives, in which the historical terrors, desires and hopes of the wolf are brought out into the light."--David Punter, University of Bristol