Chapter 6 introduces the concepts associated with supernatural transformations, metamorphosis, shapeshifting, and hybridity, each expressing a different approach to the transformation of the female body. Plath’s poems frequently seek inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which she interrogates the powerlessness of women who transform from human to vegetal form. The chapter situates Plath’s poetic narratives among her female contemporaries, such as Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and even Margaret Atwood, who rely on feminist retellings of classical myths to question concerns about women’s autonomy and social position. The chapter outlines Plath’s employment of the concept of shapeshifting, associated with witches and folkloric beliefs, to reflect on the liberatory powers the animal form (often flying creatures) offers to women. It also argues that Plath experiments with the fluid boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in one of her most well-known poems, ‘Ariel,’ which portrays an imaginative flying motion as transformation.

The closing chapter of the book illustrates the practical implications of Kant’s political and legal philosophy for climate change. Texts like the Doctrine of Right and Toward Perpetual Peace are used to rethink the complex political and collective challenges of the climate crisis. These, once again, confound the individualist and nonconsequentialist standard reading of Kant. First, I argue that Kant’s state of nature theorizing leads to prescriptions that are compatible with and justify coercive domestic and international policy to address the crisis. Second, I zoom out to consider whether Kant’s political philosophy as a whole remains too conservative or outdated to provide guidance regarding deep climate adaptation, mitigation, and radical institutional reform, answering in the negative. I close by discussing political obligations owed to peoples, interpreted in the face of the Hobbesian call for a global climate leviathan.

Chapter 5 begins with griffins and gorgons, exploring the connections between wondrous objects and hybrids. Gorgons also prompt a discussion of gender and hybridity. This chapter juxtaposes the gorgon and other female demons who threaten mothers and children with the satyr, an exaggerated figure of the man identified by and with his penis. These matched exaggerations, by turns horrific and comic, illustrate the function of the hybrid as a projection of certain human anxieties: what if the man were no more than his erection? What if the woman were as dangerous as she is beautiful? What if a mother devoured her children instead of protecting them? Each caricature exists as a counterpoint to the ordinary men and women encountered in our daily lives, but in recognizing these alternatives the Greeks are also using the contrafactual to ask what exactly it means to be human. For this reason, transformation is a recurring theme in early Greek culture, with a wide range of applications from the stage to ritual initiation. Here too the cosmos is a space of entanglement. If a human shares some characteristic with an animal, does the divine also partake of this mutability?

This introduction frames the entire project, the purpose of which is to excavate a sense of erotic striving from the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Platonic Alcibiades I and to argue that its arousal is the beginning of the philosophical life. Proclus and Olympiodorus, inheritors of the commentary tradition that begins with Iamblichus and traces its roots even further back to Plotinus, insisted that their students read the Alcibiades I first of all of Plato’s dialogues because of its emphasis on self-knowledge. They themselves, modelling what they witnessed in Plato, awakened their own students to what it is to be human and directed them accordingly. Self-knowledge, which by the end of the dialogue becomes identification of self with soul, is, in the hands of the commentators, the beginning of psychoerotic metamorphosis, a conversion of initiation that, when properly channelled, seeks wisdom as its sole desideratum.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that Empedocles’ concept of rebirth can be reconciled within his physical system. In this regard I first show that, by drawing on the imaginary of metamorphosis tales, Empedocles conceptualizes rebirths as changes of forms that are analogous to those transformations the elements undergo when mixed in mortal bodies. Second, Empedocles’ concept of rebirth entails personal survival upon the death of the body and, indeed, upon several deaths. Third, although claims to personal survival are thought not to fit with Empedocles’ considerations on psychological and mental functions, and for this reason scholars generally do not consider rebirth as a positive, physical doctrine, here I suggest a different explanation. My argument is that the way in which Empedocles conceived of rebirth as a change of forms led him to marginalize the soul; that is, to fail a reflection on the relationship between personal survival and the self, and the role of the soul in it. Yet he had a traditional, Homeric concept of soul that can not only sustain the idea of disembodied existence, as it stands for personal survival upon death; it can also be adapted to the principles of his physics.

This chapter explores metamorphosis by focusing on the so-called ‘shearwaters of Diomedea’ – a group of seabirds whose odd behaviour recalls their previous existence as humans. It puts these birds in conversation with other humans-turned-animals both ancient and modern and investigates how they reflect on the experience of transformation. The chapter reveals that both ancient and modern tales of metamorphosis draw on the notion of hybridity in so far as many of the creatures undergoing such a transformation are, in effect, hybrids: they retain part of their human identity while also sporting the body of an animal. At the same time the chapter points to an important difference between ancient and modern ways of thinking the human. It shows that modern tales of metamorphosis tend to explore the dissolution of the boundary that separates the human from all other animals. The ancient conversation, by contrast, returns to – and ultimately affirms – the positions of some of the Greek philosophers arguing for an essential human difference.

The introduction takes the reader into the history of oil in the Ecuadorean Amazon in the twentieth century. Zooming out from the testimony of a former oil worker, a historical overview sheds light on the dynamics of oil extraction in the region by national and international companies. This history is analyzed from the interdisciplinary perspective of the Environmental Humanities, combining archival and oral sources, sociological and anthropological concepts, and a mixed-methods approach. From this vantage point, the changes in the rainforest brought by the oil industry can be narrated as a fundamental metamorphosis of the landscape, its ecology, and its inhabitants. Drawing from Amazonian and European notions of metamorphosis, four dimensions of this process are particularly relevant for the historical analysis: conceptual, material, toxic, and social. The metamorphosis as metaphor offers a perspective on historical change in the Amazon as a process driven by the conflictive interaction between the rainforest ecosystem and the narrative and material manifestations of the oil industry.

In the early 1990s, when Texaco left its operation in Ecuador behind, the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon into a polluted resource environment came to light, attracting the interest of national and international NGOs and causing global and tedious legal aftermath: In the famous case Aguinda v. Texaco, a group of affected indigenous people and settlers sued the oil corporation to compensate for the environmental and social damage done in the Amazon – with mixed results. The final section of the book is structured in a loosely juridical fashion: starting with the discussion of the evidence – a summary of the recent history of the region and how human–nature relationships changed in the twentieth century – the conclusion problematizes the unfolding of the global legal battle and the contradicting judgments it produced. As the legal pathway appears to not offer justice to the affected people, a closing statement calls for alternative solutions to the plight of the Amazon, locally and globally.

This chapter sheds light on the uses of modern alchemical discourse by three artists and writers who were affiliated with surrealism: British-born artist Leonora Carrington, British artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, and Greek poet and critic Nanos Valaoritis. All three writers experimented with the potentialities of alchemical language, writing novels premised upon esotericism and myth in terms of imagery, plot, and sensibility: The Stone Door (1977) and The Hearing Trumpet (1976) by Carrington; Goose of Hermogenes (1961) and I Saw Water (2014) by Colquhoun; From the Bones Rising (1982) and Xerxes’s Treasure (1984) by Valaoritis. Influenced by several strands of the alchemical discourse, Carrington, Colquhoun, and Valaoritis resorted to ideas corroborating the transgression of the dominant Enlightenment concept of the unified rational subject, and utilized them as subversive tropes in their revision of hegemonic body politics. In this revision, identity constitution is conceptualized as a process that is open-ended, non-teleological, and performative. The chapter charts these corporeal cartographies, shedding light on the three writers’ appropriations of alchemy in their writing practices; it shows that the alchemical genre primarily functioned as a platform for the exploration of performative manifestations of identity and contributed to fecund redefinitions of the novel.

The Introduction familiarizes the reader with the main subject of the book, the economic governance of the Eurozone and the metamorphosis it underwent over the past decade of crises, and the author’s motives for exploring this topic. The Introduction then clarifies the analytical framework on which the book rests, by substantiating the understanding of the rule of law it favors and identifying the operational criteria on the basis of which the analysis will be conducted.

This chapter looks at the adaptations, mutations, and analogies of Ovidian themes and dynamics of metamorphosis in Greek and Roman narrative poems. The first part offers a sampling of metamorphic moments in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, arguing for a far-reaching comparability with Ovidian techniques, and also opening up a comparison between Dionysiac metamorphosis and metamorphosis in the Christian story. The second part explores the uses of metamorphosis in Latin Christian poetry on biblical stories, and in narratives of conversion, taking examples from biblical epic, Paulinus of Nola, and Prudentius. The question is posed of whether there is a specifically Christian poetics of metamorphosis.

How Norman Mailer enters the discussion of Modernism may be as opaque as the discussion of Modernism itself. Several lines of approach, however, may be useful: First, which traditions did Mailer gravitate towards; second, how did Mailer define himself as an artist; third, what were the central elements of his worldview and poetics; and fourth, what questions of form and style did his work attempt to explore? This chapter situates Mailer’s work within the literary and historical context of the Modernist movement by focusing on his use of persona, his worldview, and the thematic content of his work.

Christopher Marlowe was the boldest of the Elizabethan Ovidians and, moreover, the first Elizabethan to translate all of Ovid’s bold erotic elegies into English and, further, to infuse his own poetry and plays with what he saw as the combustible core of Ovid’s boldness in the erotic elegies, or Amores. This chapter establishes Marlowe’s iconoclasm and supposed exceptionalism as a model for his peers and colleagues to adopt and adapt. For Marlowe, Ovidian allusion involves a challenge to change, adapt, and innovate. This is the poetic model that Marlowe employed in his verse and plays such as Tamburlaine, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus and, moreover, the model he passed along to his colleagues and followers.

This chapter presents carefully argued accessible readings of Atwood’s poetry across five decades. It explores her poetics of metamorphosis, moving the argument beyond the “polarities” and “dualities” that preoccupied early Atwood criticism to consider how her poems continually operate in borderline territory, shifting between the world of everyday experience and a mythologized landscape of the imagination. Detailed analyses of poems in The Circle Game, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Power Politics, and Two-Headed Poems, up to Morning in the Burned House and The Door trace Atwood’s thematic and imagistic range, continually opening up possibilities for transformation and renewal. The chapter considers not only Atwood’s historical consciousness and her use of classical and indigenous mythology but also her interest in sexual and national politics, the role of the poet and of poetry in contemporary society, and in her later volumes her personal meditations on aging and mortality.