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on the island of Saaremaa (historically, Ösel), which comprise about one-seventh of the full corpus. Saaremaa has been chosen, firstly, because virtually all types of Estonian werewolf legend have been told there; and, secondly, for the reason that there are more tales about women as werewolves on Saaremaa in comparison with the rest of Estonia. Saaremaa, Estonia’s largest
This book explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. It focuses on folkloric records of the island of Saaremaa, Estonia, a territory in which, unusually, there are more folktales of female werewolves than male. The book also explores tropes and strategies of feminisation evident in Werewolf: The Apocalypse to reveal an almost unique disavowal of the masculine werewolf in favour of traditions of presenting the female werewolf. The examination of Honoré Beaugrand's 'The Werewolves' offers fruitful discussion of the female werewolf's integration into colonial discourse and narrative. In the nineteenth century, at the fin de siècle, female authors began to produce fiction about the female werewolf. Two of the most interesting examples of this, which have been curiously neglected by critics, are Clemence Housman's novella The Werewolf and Rosamund Marriott Watson's poem 'A Ballad of the Were-wolf', written under the pseudonym Graham R. Tomson and published in 1891. Then, the book examines twenty-first-century young adult paranormal romance texts, considering the ways in which such texts associate lycanthropy with contemporary idealisations and constructions of the post-adolescent female. It explores presentations of body-centred violence in film, drawing parallels between female werewolves and other violent females in horror cinema. Finally, the book also examines cinematic representations of the femme animale with an exploration of how this conceptualisation of the feminine might inform a reading of Ginger Snaps.
exclude the female werewolf in much the same way as the mythic narrative of the primal hunter. Indeed, this is potentially evidenced by counterpoints produced by cultures with different economic traditions. As Merili Metsvahi’s Chapter 2 attests, the island of Saaremaa, an area of Estonia with matrilineal property inheritance and female land ownership throughout the late Middle Ages and into early
, an island at the edge of the world as described by Pytheas, was likely the largest Estonian island Saaremaa (literally, the isle-land); and a city depicted in the Arabic traveller al-Idris’s travelogue turns out to be Tallinn – the largest city and the historical capital of Estonia, located at the Baltic Sea, 80 km off the Finnish coast. Placing Pytheas’s Thule to Saaremaa (unlike the majority of