OUT NOW: She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Paperback Edition)

My edited collection She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves is now available in paperback from Manchester University Press! Essays on lady-lycanthropes in folklore, history, witchcraft trials, literature, cinema, television and gaming, by Merili Metsvahi, Rolf Schulte, Jay Cate, Jazmina Cininas, Shannon Scott, Carys Crossen, Willem de Blécourt, Peter Hutchings, Barbara Creed, Laura Wilson, and me!

She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves
Edited by Hannah Priest
Price: £14.99

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, or to buy a copy, please visit the publisher's website.

OUT NOW: Gothic Studies 18:1 (May 2016)

The May 2016 issue of Gothic Studies is now out.

Articles:

Playing the Man: Manliness and Mesmerism in Richard Marsh's The Beetle
Natasha Rebry

'Your Girls That You All Love Are Mine Already': Criminal Female Sexuality in Bram Stoker's Dracula
Beth Shane

'Mensonge': The Rejection of Enlightenment in the Unreliable 'Souvenirs' of Charles Nodier
Matthew Gibson

The Mirror and the Window: The Seduction of Innocence and Gothic Coming of Age in Låt Den Rätte Komma In/Let The Right One In
Amanda Howell

Labyrinths of Conjecture: The Gothic Elsewhere in Jane Austen's Emma
Andrew McInnes

Gothic Stagings: Surfaces and Subtexts in the Popular Modernism of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot Series
Taryn Norman

Reviews:

Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (London, 2015)
Deborah G. Christie

Minna Vuohelainen, Richard Marsh (Cardiff, 2015); Stephan Karshay, Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke, 2015)
Emma Liggins

Wickham Clayton (ed.), Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film (London, 2015)
Shellie McMurdo

Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville (eds), The Gothic and the Everyday: Living Gothic (London, 2015)
Hannah Priest

Cristina Artenie, Dracula Invades England: the Text, the Context and the Readers (Montreal, 2015)
Jillian Wingfield

For more information, or to subscribe to the journal, please visit the Manchester University Press website. As part of their Halloween special offer, online access to this issue of Gothic Studies is free throughout October.

OUT NOW: She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Female Werewolves (Manchester University Press, 2015)

edited by Hannah Priest

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.

#lycanthrovember

As some of you might have seen, Hic Dragones have been talking a bit about #lycanthrovember, so I thought I'd do a quick blog post about it. #lycanthrovember was my idea, as basically a month-long version of #WerewolfWednesday. (And yes, I did come up with the name. And no, it's not my best work.) It's shaping up to be quite a werewolf-y month for me, so I thought it would be cool to share the lycanthropic love on social media - if you have any werewolf related projects, artwork, books or films, feel free to add the hashtag so we can share them.

To kick off, then, at Hic Dragones are running a November-long offer on K Bannerman's wonderful Canadian werewolf novel The Tattooed Wolf: order the paperback or eBook from the Hic Dragones website and get our short collection Wolf-Girls: Dark Tales of Teeth, Claws and Lycogyny absolutely free!

Also from Hic Dragones, if you fancy a bit of Victorian Gothic werewolf fiction, Digital Periodicals is currently serializing George Reynolds' Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf. New instalments are published every fortnight in eBook formats, and are available for the princely sum of £1.

On a personal note, I have a werewolf short story entitled 'Nimby' coming out in the Fox Spirit Books' European Monsters anthology. I'll be blogging a bit more about that as the publication date gets closer. And my academic book on female werewolves (with Manchester University Press) finally has a wonderful cover and a publication date: She-Wolf: a Cultural History of Female Werewolves will be out in April 2015.

Now it's over to you... what werewolf-y things would you like to plug this month?

Happy #lycanthrovember!

Giveaway: Two Books from MUP

The good people at Hic Dragones are giving away two titles from Manchester University Press. International entry welcome. Enter via the Rafflecopter widget below.

Fred Botting, Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic
Horror isn’t what it used to be. Nor are its Gothic avatars. The meaning of monsters, vampires and ghosts has changed significantly over the last two hundred years, as have the mechanisms (from fiction to fantasmagoria, film and video games) through which they are produced and consumed. Limits of horror, moving from gothic to cybergothic, through technological modernity and across a range of literary, cinematic and popular cultural texts, critically examines these changes and the questions they pose for understanding contemporary culture and subjectivity. Re-examining key concepts such as the uncanny, the sublime, terror, shock and abjection in terms of their bodily and technological implications, this book advances current critical and theoretical debates on Gothic horror to propose a new theory of cultural production based on an extensive discussion of Freud’s idea of the death drive. Limits of Horror will appeal to students and academics in Literature, Film, Media and Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory.

Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny
This study is of the uncanny; an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, "The Uncanny" (Das Unheimliche). Where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, deja-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness", the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy and madness, as well as more "applied" readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film and religion.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

CFP: New Perspectives on the Gothic in the Age of Terror(ism): The Horror? The Horror!

A special issue of Gothic Studies journal

This special issue will examine what happens to the Gothic as a literary and filmic genre along its main thematic lines in the post 9/11 era and its age of terror(ism):

• the staging of the Other (the irrational, the monstrous, the uncanny)
• the staging of death and violence (light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, tragic vs. abject)
• the staging of community and the social (including the border and the law)
• the instability of the modern subject

1. What ‘happens’ to these themes? How are they modified? altered? Has 9/11 and the pervasive sense of global terror changed our understanding of terror? What about the place of capitalism and the crisis? What images and protagonists has this new Gothic proposed in what can be called an ‘imagination’ of disaster?

2. What new fears are being addressed and represented by the Gothic, including visually within the cinema and in the recent proliferation of television series? What loss? What guilt?

3. What is the place of race and ethnicity in this epistemological landscape? Can the concepts of ‘mimicry’ (Bhabha) and ‘differAnce’ (Derrida) be used to revisit the theoretical foundations of the Gothic? Can we talk about a ‘racial Gothic’ as Leonardo Cassuto spoke of a ‘racial grotesque’?

4. The case of the Southern Gothic, and the encounter with what has been left at the margin, could be explored within the theoretical framework proposed by Kristeva in the Powers of Horror, by Anzaldúa in Borderlands or by Agamben in Homo Sacer. Can we also talk about a New Southern Gothic?

5. How does the Gothic engage with religion in our increasingly secular and yet religiously polarized world?

6. What happens to the question of ‘knowledge’?

7. How does the commercial success and mainstreaming of Gothic in the last decade affect its ability to figure terror and resistance to terror?

8. How has the Gothic responded to the constant state of war since 2001? What about the weaponization of various technologies, including video games? How have drones, Predators, Reapers and other mechanized death machines impacted the Gothic imagination?

9. How have Gothic texts outside of the US responded to the attack on the World Trade Center and America’s militarized and violent response? How does Canadian Gothic position itself in relation to the politics of post-9/11 America? What about Mexican or South American Gothic?

10. How have new technologies impacted the literary or visual Gothic? For example, the explosion of hand-held camera horror films, night vision sequences and closed-circuit video imagery?

Proposals (500 words) and brief CVs should be addressed to both editors of the volume by 1 June 2013.

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (University of Lausanne) and Marie Lienard-Yeterian (Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis)