She-Wolf explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. The book includes contributors from various disciplines, and offers a cross-period, interdisciplinary exploration of a perennially popular cultural production. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day with chapters on folklore, history, witch trials, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and gaming. Considering issues such as religious and social contexts, colonialism, constructions of racial and gendered identities, corporeality and subjectivity – as well as female body hair, sexuality and violence – She-Wolf reveals the varied ways in which the female werewolf is a manifestation of complex cultural anxieties, as well as a site of continued fascination.
Contents:
Introduction: a history of female werewolves
Hannah Priest
Estonian werewolf legends collected from the island of Saaremaa
Merili Metsvahi
‘She transformed into a werewolf, devouring and killing two children’: trials of she-werewolves in early modern French Burgundy
Rolf Schulte
Participatory lycanthropy: female werewolves in Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Jay Cate
Fur girls and wolf women: fur, hair and subversive female lycanthropy
Jazmina Cininas
Female werewolf as monstrous other in Honoré Beaugrand’s ‘The Werewolves’
Shannon Scott
‘The complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul’: conflict between societal expectations and individual desires in Clemence Housman’s ‘The Werewolf’ and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’
Carys Crossen
I was a teenage she-wolf: boobs, blood and sacrifice
Hannah Priest
The case of the cut off hand: Angela Carter’s werewolves in historical perspective
Willem de Blécourt
The she-wolves of horror cinema
Peter Hutchings
Ginger Snaps: the monstrous feminine as femme animale
Barbara Creed
Dans Ma Peau: shape-shifting and subjectivity
Laura Wilson
For more information, please see the publisher's website.