Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature - Hardcover

From goshawks to enchanters, Transforming Tales provides an illuminating analysis of metamorphic figures and writing across francophone medieval literarture, combining perceptive close readings with elegant analysis informed by Derrida, Julia Kristeva and other theorists. Both medievalists and those interested in metamorphosis will find much to engage with in Griffin's supple book (Elizabeth Dearnley, The Times Literary Supplement)

this book is a pleasure to read and, by uniting physical and textual changes, metamorphoses and repetitions in one place, it offers new ways to approach not only the medieval body but also the medieval text itself so often written, as Griffin reminds us, on skin. (Forum for Modern Language Studies)

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.