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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.
electrical thunderstorms. The sound of the wolf is a recurring feature in haunted-house attractions, Gothic radio programmes and even the DVD menus for classic horror films. It is an immediately recognisable aural signifier for horror. The aim of this chapter will therefore be to consider the role that sound plays in the construction of the Gothic and horror genres, in particular through the soundscape of the werewolf film. While there is a growing body of work on music in relation to horror and the Gothic, sound still remains a too-often overlooked
Introduction The nineteenth century was a significant one in terms of the figure of the female werewolf. The history of the werewolf in fiction was by this point nearly 5,000 years old, 1 and although the female werewolf had appeared in chronicles and treatises on witchcraft prior to 1800, such as Henri Boguet’s Discours execrable des
A year later, however, the same authorities in Dôle amended the edict and deleted the term ‘werewolf’; the human element had now been eliminated. Scepticism towards the concept of werewolves had gained the upper hand amongst the elite of Franche-Comté, and this was reflected in amendments to official regulations. 26 The concept of the werewolf nevertheless remained
, foreigners – who must be dispatched to restored order; they can never assimilate. That social class shift in the werewolf persona, from gentleman victim to low-status monster, has continued in many popular media depictions of the creature ever since The Wolf Man . This chapter will explore this lesser position of the werewolf by first briefly examining that seminal film. Then, in an effort to contextualise the personification of the werewolf as la bête rather than a beauty, I draw briefly on texts from the seventeenth century through the Victorian
Granny and the hunter have concluded their tale (without much dialogue, but with an interruption by the werewolf emphasising that his human skin is now the same as the girl’s), Red Riding Hood (as the girl is called in this version), expresses her thoughts: But I would be sorry for the poor thing, whatever it was, man or beast or
from the pages of Doctor Who Weekly and Doctor Who Monthly , and Flinthair, the prehistoric werewolf encountered by the Second Doctor in the story ‘Loop the Loup’ in the Doctor Who Yearbook 1994. 2 It would seem that the lupine infection is heavy in the blood of the franchise after all, which might send us back to the small screen for a closer study. As werewolf lore tells us, we need to look for the fur beneath the skin; specifically, we need to look for the werewolf by any other name
coming into place. One can only wear the wolf if one is not already a wolf. Subsequent werewolf narratives have continued to animate this binary opposition and, as Chantal Bourgault du Coudray suggests, to challenge and complicate it. Drawing on Žižek's analysis of the classic ‘wild’ child, Kaspar Hauser, which he uses to illuminate the position of the Enlightenment monster who is read as prelinguistic or ‘natural’ yet inserted into the symbolic order, she states that ‘the werewolf also appears as a bridge between nature and culture, by exceeding both categories and
, that are considered to be the third largest in the world after the Irish and Finnish archives. The existence of the Estonian Folklore Archives (EFA) has, to a great degree, determined the development of the study of Estonian folklore in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The archives contain approximately 1,400 texts on the topic of werewolves. This article discusses the werewolf texts collected
necessary, part of their social world, but it is construed, by humans, as a moral ecology, and the human judgements of the morality of that ecology construct the nature of wolves. In order to understand more fully how the werewolf emerged it is necessary to turn to wolves themselves and their behaviours in particular environments and landscapes. However, there is an immediate set of issues with the phrase ‘wolves themselves’. When and how can wolves ever be themselves? This has two key elements: that which wolves do amongst themselves to maintain and