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Richard Buxton discuss five examples of narratives which relate in some way to divine metamorphosis, whether as animals or humans, for the purpose of presenting themselves to mortals. The narratives studied are the following: Athena’s encounter with Telemachos in the Odyssey, Apollo in the Hymn to Apollo, Thetis’ relationship with Achilles, Dionysos in the Bacchae and Zeus’ serial metamorphoses in pursuit of his erotic ambitions. After drawing conclusions about each of these metamorphoses and epiphanies, Buxton concludes by considering what light this material might shed on the old problem of how far Greek religion was essentially anthropomorphic.

This chapter presents an interview with Gabriel García Márquez, who talks about his literary influences, including William Faulkner. García Márquez cites Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis as the fundamental influence on his writing. A decisive influence on him, according to García Márquez, is Oedipus Rex. He also discusses Faulkner's influence on him, claiming that they share similar experiences. In particular, García Márquez reveals that Faulkner's whole world—the world of the South which he writes about—was very like his world, that it was created by the same people. He also cites the fact that Faulkner is in a way a Latin American writer whose world is that of the Gulf of Mexico.

This chapter investigates the concept of becoming otherwise in Ananda Devi’s writing as a form of resistance to socio-cultural hierarchies of difference in Indo-Mauritian and Indian contexts. The chapter begins by exploring metamorphoses as examples of Deleuzian becoming-animal, before proceeding to analyse the space in between subjects as a transformative encounter that collapses transcendent relations between characters, as well as between writer and text. In its analysis of Devi’s work, the chapter also opens out dialogues between Deleuze and Irigaray, looking in particular at the concept of mutual engenderment, as a means of shaping an affective philosophy of polyphony through the interlacing of embodied and creative lines of flight.

This chapter focuses on corporeality and explores forms of cinematic ‘becomings’ and cinematic embodiment. It argues that the films evoke the uncertainty of identity through their exploration of the body’s vulnerability and the constant process of metamorphosis in which they are caught

This chapter undertakes close readings of Kafka’s first and last published animal narratives, The Metamorphosis and “Josephine the Singer.” It focuses upon the different strategies by which Kafka rendered any species determination of the stories’ protagonists, Gregor Samsa and Josephine (as well as her people), indefinite and how he thereby confronted his prospective readers with the constructedness of both human/animal difference and species essentialism. These works are then seen as interventions, whether effectively or not, against an apparatus that these two constructs conditioned, an apparatus that helped naturalize both Gentile/Jew difference and the violent means sustaining it: the identification of the Jew-Animal. It situates these stories over and against historical and literary associations of Jews with vermin (Ungeziefer) and mice as well as in relation to Kafka’s own encounters with such creatures recorded in his letters and in his posthumously published story “The Burrow.” The chapter also includes a discussion of how at the opening of Maus II Art Spiegelman subverted possible essentialist identification of Jews with mice by his readers.

This chapter investigates two case studies regarding monopolizing the culture. Sir John Harington's toilet is designed with the specific goal of removing not only all waste but also all odors, of eradicating the eliminated. His Metamorphosis appears to have earned him yet another banishment from the court of Elizabeth, but to suppose Elizabeth's motive to have been mere overniceness would be a mistake. Davenant v. Hurdis shows Coke directing antimonopolistic weapons against even the traditional privileges of an established guild. The Schollers Purgatory dances on the brink of authorial property. The novelty of George Wither's protest is that he gives the crimes an unvarnished description as economic offenses, as stolen labor. The Schollers Purgatory also comes close to enacting a rhetorical revolution, if not a conceptual one.

Anthropologists have discovered that, globally, the older old religions were animistic. From Ovid’s shape-shifting metamorphosis of stones to Carl Jung’s study of the “psychification” of rocks, across world cultures “dead matter” was, and continues to be, imbued with life. Even today, we routinely say that stones stand, fall, heave, mound, rush. Lava flows, glaciers are gravelly, silt becomes crusty, clay dries into mosaic, sand compresses into boulders. The question this essay poses, then, is, do gems have agency? Do they incite the brain to infer the existence of a hidden order inside the reflective mass? Are self-generating transformations of substance possible (as Ovid believed)? That is, does their structure provoke mentalizing (Theory of Mind) and are they in some way impersonally “minded” (tending toward something}? Clearly, colored stones do not possess what cognitive scientists and neurophilosphers call “consciousness.” But another way of understanding colored stones as “agentic,” that is, as the perhaps primal, performative substance rather than just an expensive bauble or ornament, comes from physicists of light investigating their propensity to hold light and capture color.

This chapter provides detailed readings of three of Kafka’s “judgment stories”: “The Judgment,” “The Metamorphosis,” and “The Stoker.” These readings reveal that Kafka compulsively stages judgment scenes in which the protagonist fails to speak in his own defense and is condemned to death and exile, in ways that foreground the fictive and performative aspects of speech. But where Kafka’s protagonists fail at self-defense, suffering bodily and social abjection as a result, Kafka as a writer “succeeds” in emerging, ecstatically, as a text. A parallel is discerned between the power wielded in speech within the story and its manifestation, and undoing, at the level of its writing. It is further shown that this paradoxical movement involves, at the level of narrative scenography, the production of corpses and abjected bodies that constitute the limit of sublimity and power implicit in the logic of the judgment narratives. It is suggested that this repetitive working over of judged bodies and ejected corpses is part of an ongoing attempt on Kafka’s part to dismantle the logic of power that governs his writing during this phase.

The motif of the werewolf’s severed paw occurs in a variety of texts of different periods. In contemporary popular culture, it is probably most familiar from Angela Carter’s fiction and Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves (based on Carter’s short stories). That this motif specifically concerns the paw/hand transformation, as well as a female werewolf, is suggestive. In medieval European literary traditions, women’s cut-off hands symbolized their role as victims of incest. Moreover, in medieval religious and literary texts, incest was seen as something nonhuman and, in some cases, specifically pertaining to wolves. This chapter will argue that the metamorphosis associated with the severed paw motif thus contains a double incest metaphor, which was later obscured in popular culture and, eventually, lost through the switch in gender of the amputee (as seen in The Company of Wolves).

The chapter examines one particularly evident case of literature borrowing from biology: the case of what Samuel Beckett calls “Darwin’s caterpillar.” This caterpillar, described in The Origin of Species, exemplifies a kind of repetition compulsion which prevents it from completing the stages of its metamorphosis into a moth. I trace the increasingly innovative ways in which novelists incorporated the repetitions of Darwin’s caterpillar into their novels. I briefly chart the caterpillar’s role in the narrative dynamics of fiction by George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Butler, and Henry Green, before devoting the bulk of the chapter to its function in Molloy, Malone, The Unnamable, and How It Is, where it evidences the continuing relevance of development in Beckett’s fiction.

This chapter considers metamorphosis and object transformation as underlying elements of animation’s specificity and representational orthodoxy. However it argues that objects in the computer-animated film are altogether more stable, prized instead according to their utilitarian value—that is, their constructive worth or usefulness—whilst animators seek to preserve physical relationships and properties. This assertion runs counter to animation’s more conventional collapsing of an object’s material honesty within the spectacle of metamorphosis. Focusing on the genre’s fascination with everyday mess, this chapter discusses the emergent importance of an aesthetics of trash within the computer-animated film, and situate their formal and narrative preoccupation with rubbish, scrap and cultural detritus within wider traditions of junk art. Several computer-animated films redeem waste products as plentiful bounty, and their attraction to scrap provides the pleasurable recuperation of trash (as art) through its practical inscription as a fully-functioning cityspaces. By connecting the industrious behaviour of characters and inventors (as they manipulate and repurpose everyday junk) to cognitive and social activities of object substitution, this chapter argues that computer-animated films invite spectators to formulate new responses to recognisable objects, and to become acquainted with the widening of junk’s functional possibility.

In the sixteenth century, European naturalists and artists took a new interest in insects, emphasizing the synchronic morphology and natural beauty of insect species. In the middle of the seventeenth century, their attention turned to the transformations of insects. Artists and naturalists painstakingly observed and recorded the metamorphoses of insect larvae into pupas and imagos. At the same time, naturalists strove to make sense of the increasingly large number of insect species that had been discovered, seeking classification systems that could embrace the myriads of distinct insects. They found it devilishly hard to reconcile a diachronic concept of the insect species, rooted in metamorphosis, with the immense diversity of the insect world. In the attempt, though, they identified patterns that their successors would draw upon to create a new science that they would eventually call, after a halting start, “entomology.”

This chapter discusses the representation of impotency, which is considered both humiliating and entertaining in early modern erotica, and evident in Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines and John Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image. It describes how “spectacular impotence” is a minor trend in modern erotica produced for women, opposing the popular assumption that the audience for pornography is male. The chapter concludes with an examination of the phallic masculinity constructed in traditional porn, including the active and passive roles of spectators and participants.

This chapter illustrates the professional life of Maria Sibylla Merian who grew up to be skilled in needlework and embroidery as well as artistically trained in the illustration of natural subjects, particularly flowers. This led to her publication of Neues Blumenbuch, a compilation of floral designs which can be used as patterns for embroidery and needlework. Merian was also involved with the study of insects wherein she created a distinct way to visually represent the life cycles of insects, which then resulted to the publication of Raupenbuch, the completion of her study on European moths and butterflies. The chapter also analyzes Merian’s visual style in her other published works such as the Blumenbuch series and Metamorphosis.

Attempts to manifest one’s suffering visually can turn aggressive if the people who have supposedly caused one’s pain refuse to see the results. Metaphors that suggest how pain looks can convey the cutting, wounding aspects of emotional anguish. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground associates spite and vengefulness with darkness and dirt and shows how painful encounters can be when a hidden creature reveals himself to others. Franz Kafka’s representation of Gregor Samsa as a monstrous vermin in The Metamorphosis forces Gregor’s family to see the emotions they have aroused by exploiting him. Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché depicts a marginalized family determined to make a privileged man see how he has benefited from their deprivation. With a violent literal and metaphoric “cut,” the poor man ensures that the rich one will never stop witnessing the pain he has caused. Manifested visually, emotional pain can show itself through violent transformations of bodies.

In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Caius Maritus Coriolanus is a superhuman Roman warrior who conquers an army of enemy Volsces in Corioles, and then returns to Rome a hero but also a potential tyrant whom the people then exile. Proud and vengeful, Coriolanus travels to Antium to join the Volsces with the promise of conquering Rome, but on campaign Coriolanus strangely metamorphoses into a dragon-like creature, until at last his mother Volumnia enters the camp as emissary and reverses his metamorphosis by speech alone, reducing her son to tears and terror in front of the Volsces, who ultimately execute him for treason. While Coriolanus has never been one of Shakespeare's more popular plays, the character of Coriolanus seems to metamorphose yet again, this time within the world of DC Comics, to become one of the most popular superheroes of all time: Superman.