Metamorphosis is present in the character of King Richard III both at a synchronic and at a diachronic level. As is stressed by the frequent use of theatrical metaphors in Shakespeare and in his sources, Richard is a very good actor: he is like a chameleon and he succeeds in his 'plots' thanks to his ability to simulate and to dissimulate. This chapter examines how the character appears (and how he changes) in Shakespeare's sources; in Shakespeare's plays, that is in Henry VI, Part 3 and in King Richard III; and, above all, in The Tragical History of King Richard III which replaced Shakespeare's play on the stage from 1700 to almost the end of the nineteenth century. Colley Cibber's Richard is both less complex and less ambiguous than Shakespeare's character. He never falters. He remains self-possessed, and his devilish will does not disintegrate as the end approaches.
Angels are the most commonly known and most potent representation of perfection and otherness. However, they have not always performed this function. Since 1945, angels have made frequent appearances in literature by Polish and Czech writers. Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Miroslav Holub and Milan Kundera use angels in various ways to illustrate epistemological and ontological enquiries, enquiries whose foundations are rooted directly or indirectly in experiences of life in countries under Nazi or Communist control. Angels are now the most commonly known and most potent representation of perfection and otherness. However, they have not always performed this function. Herbert's interest in angels and heaven is rooted in his contempt for the ideals of Nazism and Communism. 'The Seventh Angel' engages with issues regarding the freedom of expression and types of censorship, be it by forces exterior to the artist or by the artist themselves, but it also asks us to consider the notion of difference, of 'deviation'.
Within the classical episteme, metamorphosis is an accepted phenomenon which is not intrinsically improbable. Beings and objects shift into one another without friction or solution. The horizon of metamorphosis is a teleological one; its function, to provide a resolution, an 'untying'. During the medieval period the literary metamorphosis is often a sophisticated device designed to convey, through symbols, metaphors and allegories, certain religious truths not otherwise easily apprehendable: the transfiguration of Pearl is the example that immediately springs to the medievalist's mind. In the early stage of science fiction, the notion of mutation was often based on the influential theories of the Dutch naturalist Hugo de Vries, and was closely connected with that of 'cosmic radiations' which produced 'instant' transformations, often originating 'superior' beings, 'supermen'. From the 1950s onwards, technology has come to play an increasingly dominant role in science fiction.
In his long allocution on ever-changing forms, towards the end of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pythagoras claims to remember his previous existence, when he was Euphorbus, Panthous' son, killed by Menelaus under the walls of Troy. Remembrance is analysed in its objective essence; through talking about himself Pythagoras scientifically investigates the vestiges of past existence. It is an attitude perfectly in line with one of the main features of Ovidian narration: to plumb feelings and moods with the curiosity and detachment of a clinician in search of phenomena which added to the universal range of wonders and transformations. In the Ovidian text, the heroes' cunosity is instead directed to the miraculous and Nestor's memories make the narration possible. Apart from Ovid's usual mixing of hints and allusions drawn from different poetics and genres and different individual poetics, the main feature of the beginning of the tale is its all-encompassing sorrow: 'silet tactusque dolore/coniugis amissae lacrimis ita fatur obortis'.
'Un realista tra virgolette', a realist in inverted commas: this self-portrait of the writer best introduces the metamorphosis of Tabucchi's fiction, a world in limine, seen from a displaced perspective, in the boundary region of inverted commas. As fiction and fantasy are necessary to experience reality, dream and hallucination become the only means of reaching one's identity, soul and Unconscious. Besides the rewritings of travel literature and the detective in the short novels of the 1980s, other stories published by Sellerio in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s similarly build on textual metamorphosis. Literature is the place where opposites come together in perpetual metamorphoses - 'literary' and 'material' culture, poetry and gastronomy, the real and the fantastic. And Requiem is one of the most ironic and lucid critiques on the contemporary state of the arts, as well as a picture of a society in transition.
One text in which both misogynous and feminist fantasies are present, and which can be taken as an example of the interweaving of the themes of metamorphosis and identity, is 'Spider Rose', a short story published in 1982 by Bruce Sterling. Spider Rose's metamorphosis, which serves as a prelude to a potentially endless malleability of identity, could be seen as the ultimate surrender of her selfhood to the alien powers of Investors, known for 'the dumb arrogance and confidence that allowed them to cruise the stars screwing their purported inferiors'. The metaphor of metamorphosis can be read in a number of ways, all relevant to feminist perspectives. It suggests that relations of dominance and subordination are constructed contingently and are part of an illusory coherence. The idea of Nothingness has always attracted philosophers but the twentieth century appears to have been the period in which nihilism became object of a specific philosophical enquiry, particularly thanks to Heidegger and Nietzsche.
The two biblical versions of the story of Creation, quoted endlessly by Renaissance writers dealing with the topic of female identity, present two incompatible notions of woman. The Protestant insistence on personal Bible-reading and the wide accessibility of the Holy Scriptures had increased the number of people familiar with biblical material. Moreover, passages from the Bible which related to the nature of woman were frequently quoted in sermons and homilies, mainly to support the notion of the submission of woman but also, even if less frequently, to sustain theories in favour of women. Besides Daniel Tuvil's Asylum Veneris and the tragicomedy Swetnam the Woman-hater probably written by Thomas Heywood, this tract elicited three answers, all published in 1617 – by which time it had already gone into four editions – and signed with women's names: Rachel Speght's A Movzell for Melastomvs, Ester Sowernam's Ester hath hang'd Haman and Costantia Munda's The Worming of a mad Dogge.
This chapter aims to follow in the work of two important writers of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Algernon Swinburne and Gabriele D'Annunzio, the metamorphosis of the literary depiction of the femme fatale, whose predecessors populate Shakespeare's plays in the characters of Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and perhaps even Juliet. Maupassant's descnption of the femme fatale as a passionate, burning animal as well as the mention of blood offers a convenient transition into a discussion of Gabriele D'Annunzio's evolution of the femme fatale, for no writer has offered a richer portrayal of her passion or bloodlust than the Italian aesthete. The extended metaphor here probably explores the relationship between D'Annunzio and Princess Maria Gravina which was developing around this time. The commentary will offer some germane observations about both Swinburne and D'Annunzio and the importance of the changing character of the femme fatale in their writings.
This chapter considers Geoffrey Chaucer's The House of Fame and the way in which the poet conceptualizes the poetic metamorphosis of history and reality in terms of alchemy. It shows how Chaucer develops an analogy between the capacity of words to imaginatively transform real events and real experiences, and the alchemical ideal of transforming material substances. Chaucer's interest in the practice of alchemy is demonstrated in 'The Canon's Yeoman's Tale', where the Yeoman tells his fellow pilgrims of his master's obsession with this secret art. Chaucer's description of the 'Wynged wondres' at this point in The House of Fame certainly corresponds with the alchemic symbolism that traditionally describes a conjunction of substances. Such explanations of Bosch's painting demonstrate the close proximity of the imaginative material shared between alchemy and the activities of the unconscious, and hence the relevance of such ideas to the effects that Chaucer seeks to create in The House of Fame.
Among literary genres, the novel is perhaps the one most suitable for discussion in connection with the idea of metamorphosis. As well as the rise of the novel, another closely-related fundamental 'metamorphosis' took place in the field of letters during the eighteenth century: the rise of the woman writer. By choosing a 'common' woman as their heroine and making her the focus of their narration, women novelists were instigating a fundamental shift from everyday reality, in which the feminine role was relegated to a 'behind-the-scenes' existence. Charlotte Lennox's novel, The Female Quixote, tells the story of a young woman, Arabella, who is brought up in complete isolation in the country, nourishing her imagination on seventeenth-century French romances. While superficially describing the redemption of a girl from her dangerous romantic dreams, The Female Quixote seems in fact to propose a salutary escape into a fantastic realm, a sort of upside-down world where the subversion of roles and rules is possible.
The Impressionist painters believed that, by discarding preconceived notions of how reality appeared, by painting only what the unmediated eye saw at a given moment, they could present a more direct and ultimately accurate depiction of reality than had been previously offered. Henry James appears to advocate a complex attitude whereby the receiving consciousness must cultivate and build upon 'a capacity for receiving straight impressions' with analysis itself cautious and impartial. Only thus can the impression be verified as much as is practically possible, countering any distortion that may have occurred. Psychological distortion in impressionist literature is readily apparent in the visual and immediate stories of Crane. Literary impressionism perhaps simply exploited a greater capacity, at least at this period in art history, to reveal the psychological distortion of a receiving consciousness, through the presentation of fictional characters.
The new physics calls all in Doubt: reality is indeterminate, it contains a paradoxical complementarity within itself. While the constant metamorphoses of reality are observed with such attention that there is a reawakening of interest in alchemy, new analogies renew metaphorical strength of language, and even allow it to perform its metaphors. The set of chaotic patterns discernible in nature is jagged and recursive: Benoit Mandelbrot's fractal geometry explores rough, irregular shapes; he finds qualities of self-similarity, that is replication of jagged patterns in smaller and smaller scales, pattern within pattern. Thus fictional strategies puncture illusions about 'given ideas' of human nature and of reality. There is an isomorphism between scientific models and textual strategies. The examples of impact of twentieth-century scientific discoveries on contemporary fiction are taken from two novels – The Carpathians by Janet Frame and Charades by Jannette Turner Hospital – which were published within a year of each other, 1988 and 1989 respectively.
Klaus Mann's late modernist novel Mephisto: The Novel of a Career was published in Amsterdam in 1936 while its author was in exile from Nazi Germany. The character of Hofgen is based on Klaus Mann's former brother-in-law, the actor Gustaf Grundgens, whose success on stage and in Weimar films M and Liebelei propelled him to stardom in Germany. Mephisto is full of symbolic transformations and metamorphoses which fuse social and cultural elements in a moralistic tale warning of excessive individualism and careerist overreaching. The chapter examines two types of transformation which relate to a reading of Mephisto as a modern European tale of metamorphosis. The first concerns a reworking of the Mann family romance, in which Klaus's father, Thomas, plays a significant role as national writer and bourgeois patriarch; and second concerns the appropriation of Faust myth in this magico-political tale. The Weimar period gave rise to a renewed interest in the Faust myth, particularly in new medium of cinema.
This chapter aims to sketch a range of ideas characteristic of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century. It has a decisive influence upon Nietzsche's thought – especially concerning the relationship between the famous notions of Will-to-Power and the Eternal Return. In turn, these Nietzschean ideas are found illuminating for a consideration of the problem of metamorphosis in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. In Mann's brief foreword to the novel, it is made clear that this is a work about radical transitions. It concerns a near past, which has 'an exaggerated pastness' because of the transformative chaos of the Great War, 'in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely left off beginning'. In a series of papers in the late 1860s, they developed the idea of the unstable system – an idea which has resurfaced again recently in the guise of chaos theory.
