The Development of the Literary Werewolf: Language, Subjectivity and Animal / Human Boundaries

My thesis reclaims the wolf from the werewolf and considers how lycanthropy can be used to explore the complex relationship between humans and wolves, using ecogothic analysis. My texts started in the Victorian period but concentrated on 20th and 21st-century narratives, including Young Adult literature, films, and other examples of popular culture. I concentrated on how wolves have been used to symbolise the wilderness and humanity’s fear of nature as a threatening Gothic Other. Rejecting more traditional explorations of the werewolf as ‘the beast within’, my thesis reclaimed the figure of the wolf from anthropocentric readings. In particular considering on how language has been used to demarcate animal alterity and deny subjectivity to non-humans.