Fantastic Body Transformations in English Literature

The literary imagination seems to be inexhaustible as to the ways in which the human body has been transformed and deformed, twisted, fractured, and re-modelled for purposes of warning and protest, fun, shock, or horror. Re-imagining the human body in strange, alien, or non-human shapes is not only a powerful aesthetic device that lends itself to a variety of purposes, but obviously a fundamental way of coming to terms with both the limits and the possibilities of our humanity, which are themselvessubject to permanent change. The aim of the present collection of essays is to explore the fantastic uses to which the human body has been put in a rich variety of texts ranging from the Middle Ages via the Renaissance to Postmodernity. The individual essays are case studies, dealing with particular texts, authors, or specific kinds and features of body transformation and give an idea of the complexity of the field and the heterogeneity of the phenomena and of their aesthetic, narratological implications as well as their cultural meanings.