She-wolf

A cultural history of female werewolves

Hannah Priest

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526116895
  9780719089343
• eBook ISBN:
  9780719098192
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

She-wolf explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. The book includes contributors from various disciplines, and offers a cross-period, interdisciplinary exploration of a perennially popular cultural production. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day with chapters on folklore, history, witch trials, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and gaming. Considering issues such as religious and social contexts, colonialism, constructions of racial and gendered identities, corporeality and subjectivity – as well as female body hair, sexuality and violence – She-wolf reveals the varied ways in which the female werewolf is a manifestation of complex cultural anxieties, as well as a site of continued fascination.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: a history of female werewolves
• Estonian werewolf legends collected from the island of Saaremaa
• ‘She transformed into a werewolf, devouring and killing two children’: trials of she-werewolves in early modern French Burgundy
• Participatory lycanthropy: female werewolves in Werewolf: The Apocalypse
• Fur girls and wolf women: fur, hair and subversive female lycanthropy
• Female werewolf as monstrous other in Honoré Beaugrand’s ‘The Werewolves’
• ‘The complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul’: conflict between societal expectations and individual desires in Clemence Housman’s The Werewolf and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’
• I was a teenage she-wolf: boobs, blood and sacrifice
• The case of the cut‑off hand: Angela Carter’s werewolves in historical perspective
• The she-wolves of horror cinema
• Ginger Snaps: the monstrous feminine as femme animale
• Dans Ma Peau: shape-shifting and subjectivity
• Select bibliography
• Index