In the company of wolves: Werewolves, wolves and wild children

By Manchester University Press

In the company of wolves presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project. It connects together innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, wild children and werewolves as portrayed in different media and genres.

We begin with the wolf itself as it has been interpreted as a cultural symbol and how it figures in contemporary debates about wilderness and nature. Alongside this, we consider eighteenth-century debates about wild children ­– often thought to have been raised by wolves and other animals – and their role in key questions about the origins of language and society. The collection continues with essays on werewolves and other shapeshifters as depicted in folk tales, literature, film and TV, concluding with the transition from animal to human in contemporary art, poetry and fashion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526129055

Book preview

In the company of wolves

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpgffirs01-fig-5002.jpg

Frontispiece. Gustave Doré, Little Red Riding Hood in Bed with the Wolf

In the company of wolves

Werewolves, wolves and wild children

Edited by

Sam George and Bill Hughes

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2903 1 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Typeset

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Contents

List of figures

Notes on contributors

Preface – Sam George

Acknowledgements

Introduction: from preternatural pastoral to paranormal romance

Sam George and Bill Hughes

Part I: Cultural images of the wolf, the werewolf and the wolf-child

1 Wolves and lies: a writer's perspective

Marcus Sedgwick

2 ‘Man is a wolf to man’: wolf behaviour becoming wolfish nature

Garry Marvin

3 When wolves cry: wolf-children, storytelling and the state of nature

Sam George

4 ‘Children of the night. What music they make!’: the sound of the cinematic werewolf

Stacey Abbott

Part II: Innocence and experience: brute creation, wild beast or child of nature

5 Wild sanctuary: running into the forest in Russian fairy tales

Shannon Scott

6 ‘No more than a brute or a wild beast’: Wagner the Wehr-wolf, Sweeney Todd and the limits of human responsibility

Joseph Crawford

7 The inner beast: scientific experimentation in George MacDonald's ‘The History of Photogen and Nycteris’

Rebecca Langworthy

8 Werewolves and white trash: brutishness, discrimination and the lower-class wolf-man from The Wolf Man to True Blood

Victoria Amador

Part III: Reinventing the wolf: intertextual and metafictional manifestations

9 ‘The price of flesh is love’: commodification, corporeality and paranormal romance in Angela Carter's beast tales

Bill Hughes

10 Growing pains of the teenage werewolf: Young Adult literature and the metaphorical wolf

Kaja Franck

11 ‘I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself’: the metafictional meanings of lycanthropic transformations in Doctor Who

Ivan Phillips

Part IV: Animal selves: becoming wolf

12 A running wolf and other grey animals: the various shapes of Marcus Coates

Sarah Wade

13 ‘Stinking of me’: transformations and animal selves in contemporary women's poetry

Polly Atkin

14 Wearing the wolf: fur, fashion and species transvestism

Catherine Spooner

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Frontispiece Gustave Doré, Scene from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ by Charles Perrault: Little Red Riding Hood in Bed with the Wolf (1867) (Alamy Stock Photo).

2.1 Wolf predation on elk © Yellowstone National Park Press Service.

2.2 Gustave Doré, Wolf Turned Shepherd (1885) (Wikimedia Commons).

2.3 A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, after Francis Barlow (1687) (Wikimedia Commons).

3.1 ‘The Bear Boy of Lithuania’ from History of Poland (1698), reproduced in Singh and Zingg, Wolf-children, p. 214.

3.2 Wolf Suckling Romulus and Remus, Siena Duomo, Tuscany, Italy (Getty Images).

3.3 Mother Wolf defends Mowgli and the wolf-cubs from Shere Khan by W.H. Drake, from Kipling, The Two Jungle Books, p. 13.

3.4 Mowgli receives news from Gray Brother by W.H. Drake, from Kipling, The Two Jungle Books, p. 125.

3.5 Amala and Kamala from Singh and Zingg, Wolf-children (1939); reproduced in Gesell, Wolf Child, facing p. 40.

3.6 Peter's collar, housed at Berkhamsted School. Reproduced by courtesy of Berkhamsted Collegiate School.

3.7 Peter's grave, St Mary's Church, Northchurch.

5.1 Viktor Vasnetsov, Ivan Tsarevich Riding the Grey Wolf (1889).

5.2 Ivan Bilibin, Vasilisa the Beautiful (1899).

12.1 Marcus Coates, Stoat, 1999. Digital video, 2:35 min. Courtesy of the artist, Kate MacGarry and Workplace Gallery. © Marcus Coates.

12.2 Marcus Coates, Goshawk (Self-portrait), 1999. Silver gelatin print, dimensions variable. Photo: Jet. Courtesy of the artist, Kate MacGarry and Workplace Gallery. © Marcus Coates.

12.3 Marcus Coates, Journey to the Lower World, 2004. Performance, digital video, 28:13 min. Image: Journey to the Lower World, Coot, 2004. Photo: Nick David. Courtesy of the artist, Kate MacGarry and Workplace Gallery. © Marcus Coates.

12.4 Marcus Coates, All the Grey Animals, 2012. MDF, emulsion paint (colour: Mid Grey), dimensions variable. Installation view, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, UK. Photo: Joe Clark. Courtesy of the artist, Kate MacGarry and Workplace Gallery. © Marcus Coates.

12.5 Robert Morris, Two Columns, 1961. Plywood, acrylic, two parts each 244 × 61 × 61 cm. © The artist, ARS, New York, 2017. Courtesy of the artist, Castelli Gallery and Sprüth Magers.

12.6 Marcus Coates, Platonic Spirit: Running Grey Wolf, 2012. MDF, emulsion paint (colour: Mid Grey), 204 × 98 × 33 cm. Installation view, Kate MacGarry, London, UK. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy of the artist, Kate MacGarry and Workplace Gallery. © Marcus Coates.

12.7 Mark Dion, Mobile Wilderness Unit – Wolf, 2006. Mixed media, 274 × 148 × 294 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna. © Mark Dion.

14.1 Ralph Lauren Autumn/Winter 2015 campaign, Sanne Vloet with dogs. © Jimmy Nelson.

14.2 ‘The Race’. Illustration by Laurence Housman to Clemence Housman's The Were-wolf.

14.3 ‘Bad Gal Rihanna: The World's Wildest Style Icon’. Rihanna photographed by Mert and Marcus, styled by Edward Enninful, W magazine, September 2014. © Mert and Marcus.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

Notes on contributors

Stacey Abbott is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Roehampton. Her main areas of research are Gothic and horror film and television, with a particular interest in screen monsters. She has written extensively on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Supernatural and True Blood. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires (2007), Angel: TV Milestone (2009) and Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century (2016) and is the co-author, with Lorna Jowett, of TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2013). She co-edited, with Lorna Jowett and Michael Starr, a special issue of Horror Studies examining the vampire on television and has written extensively about Dracula in film and television. She is currently co-editing, with Lorna Jowett, Global TV Horror (University of Wales Press, forthcoming) and is writing the BFI Classic on Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark.

Victoria Amador earned her doctorate in creative writing and American literature from the University of Denver. Her research interests include feminist discourses in classical Hollywood cinema, vampire and Gothic representations in British and American film and literature, and fashion history. She has held two Fulbright Senior Lectureships in American literature, received three teaching awards and has worked as a professor as well as administrator in international higher education for over thirty years. Her book Olivia de Havilland: Lady Triumphant was published by the University of Kentucky Press in May 2019. Victoria is also one of the co-editors of SXSE Magazine, an online publication on photography of the American South, and a long-time member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Polly Atkin is a poet and researcher based in Cumbria. Her doctorate was on Dove Cottage and was conducted under the AHRC Landscape and Environment project, in collaboration with The Wordsworth Trust and the University of Lancaster, UK. She is working on a related monograph, exploring connections between Romantic legacies, ecopoetics and tourism. Her debut poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (2017) was followed by With Invisible Rain (2018), which draws on Dorothy Wordsworth's late journals. She is collaborating on a non-fiction book reflecting on place, belonging and chronic illness.

Joseph Crawford is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of three academic monographs: Raising Milton's Ghost (2011), Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013) and The Twilight of the Gothic (2014). He is currently working on a fourth monograph on the relationship between inspiration and insanity in post-Romantic British poetry. His research interests include Romantic poetry, Gothic fiction, romance novels, digital horror media and the interlinked cultural histories of terrorism, conspiracy theory, drug use, insanity, fringe religion, political radicalism and the occult.

Kaja Franck is a post-doctoral researcher with the Open Graves, Open Minds project. Her thesis explores the literary werewolf as an eco-Gothic monster, interrogating the relationship between wilderness, wolves and werewolves, and how language is used to demarcate animal alterity. Her publications include an essay on the lupine nature of Bram Stoker's Dracula, in Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, edited by Robert McKay and John Miller (2017), and ‘Banishing the Beast: The Role of the Wolf in Walpurgis Night, or Dracula's Guest, and Its Omission from Dracula’, Journal of Supernatural Studies (2016). She is the co-editor with Janine Hatter of the online journal Revenant's special issue on werewolves (2016) She is currently working on a chapter on the eco-Gothic for Clive Bloom's Gothic Handbook and an article on werewolves in the Canadian wilderness and the Ginger Snaps trilogy for a folklore edition of Gothic Studies (forthcoming, 2019). She is writing her first novel, a tale of first love, the Fens and will-o’-the-wisps.

Sam George is Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and the Convenor of the Open Graves, Open Minds project. Her interviews have appeared in newspapers from the Guardian to the Independent and the Wall Street Journal. Her research straddles the boundaries between the life sciences, animal studies and the Gothic. She is the author of Botany, Sexuality and Women's Writing (2007) and the co-editor with Alison Martin of Women and Botany (2011). She has co-edited with Bill Hughes, Open Graves, Open Minds (2013), a special OGOM issue of Gothic Studies on vampires (2013), and a second on ‘Wildness and Werewolves’ (2019). Recent articles include but are not limited to: ‘Spirited Away: Transylvania and the Pied Piper and Dracula Myths in Britain and Germany’, in Dracula: An International Perspective, edited by Marius-Mircea Crişan (2017); ‘Wolves in the Wolds: Late Capitalism, the English Eerie, and the Weird Case of Old Stinker the Hull Werewolf’, Gothic Studies, Werewolves and Wildness 21.1 (May 2019) and, with Kaja Franck, ‘Contemporary Werewolves’, in Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (2019). She is completing a monograph on the cultural history of the shadow.

Bill Hughes is co-organiser, with Dr Sam George, of the Open Graves, Open Minds project at the University of Hertfordshire. He is co-editor (with Dr George) of Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (2013). His most recent publications include ‘But By Blood no Wolf Am I’, an essay on language and agency in Maggie Stiefvater's Wolves of Mercy Falls series in Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, edited by Robert McKay and John Miller (2017). Bill has a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Sheffield, UK. He has publications out or forthcoming on communicative reason and the interrelation of the dialogue genre and English novels of the long eighteenth century. Bill has also published on Richard Hoggart, and intertextuality and the Semantic Web. He is currently researching contemporary paranormal romance and Young Adult Gothic from the perspectives of formalism, genre and critical theory. This apparently disparate research is not unfocused; it has at its core concerns with the Enlightenment as viewed through the Frankfurt School and the Marxist tradition.

Rebecca Langworthy has recently submitted her PhD to the University of Aberdeen; it focuses on the development of adult fantasy in the works of George MacDonald. Her research interests include Scottish literature, fantasy, the Gothic and Victorian literature. She has published on a range of authors including George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling and Michel Faber.

Garry Marvin is Professor of Animal/Human relations at the University of Roehampton, UK. He is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on how animals figure, and are configured, in human cultures. One of his research interests is the contestations and conflicts, in terms of perspectives and practices, between different groups of people and different animal kinds. In this context he has written on the bullfight in modern Spain, trophy hunting and the experiences of hunters, and human–wildlife conflicts in regimes of conservation. He is the author of Wolf (2012) and, most recently, co-editor, with Susan McHugh of Human–Animal Studies: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences (2018).

Ivan Phillips is Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He has published on many aspects of literature and popular culture, including chapters in Sam George and Bill Hughes, Open Graves, Open Minds (2013); Paul Booth, Fan Phenomena: Doctor Who (2013); and Andrzej Gąsiorek and Nathan Waddell, Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide (2015). He also reviews and blogs for Critical Studies in Television. His book Once Upon a Time Lord: The Myths and Stories of Doctor Who will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2020.

Shannon Scott is an adjunct Professor of English at the University of St Thomas and Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota, USA. She has published articles in a number of journals such as Neo-Victorian Studies, Gothic Studies, Marvels & Tales, Senses of Cinema, Film & History and the Victorian Network. In 2013, she co-edited with Alexis Easley the collection Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838–1896. In 2015, her essay ‘Female Werewolf as Monstrous Other in Honoré Beaugrand's The Werewolves’ was published in She-wolf: A Cultural History of the Female Werewolf, edited by Hannah Priest (2015). She continues to write both creatively and critically in the genres of Gothic and horror.

Marcus Sedgwick is an internationally award-winning writer of over forty books for young people and adults, including both fiction and non-fiction. His work has been translated into over thirty languages. He was author-in-residence for three years at Bath Spa University, has written for papers such as The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times and regularly teaches creative writing at the Arvon Foundation and Tŷ Newydd. He has judged numerous books awards, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Costa Book Awards. His previous contribution to Open Graves, Open Minds was a chapter on the folkloric origins of the vampire in relation to his novel My Swordhand Is Singing (2006). The chapter in this present work derives from his interest in feral children, having written the character of ‘Mouse’ in The Dark Horse (2002). He was born in East Kent but now lives on a mountainside in the Haute-Savoie in the French Alps, where just once, at dusk, he heard the howl of a lone wolf.

Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, UK. She has published widely on Gothic literature, film, fashion and popular culture, including the books Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Contemporary Gothic and Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Gothic (with Emma McEvoy), Monstrous Media / Spectral Subjects: Imaging the Gothic from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (with Fred Botting) and Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory and Genre on Television (with Jeffrey A. Weinstock). She was co-president of the International Gothic Association 2013–2017. She is currently working on a cultural history of the white dress in Gothic fiction, film and fashion media.

Sarah Wade completed her PhD entitled ‘Species of Wonder: Human–Animal Relations in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture’ in the History of Art department at University College London in 2018. Her research interrogates human–animal relations and representations of animals in contemporary art and visual culture, particularly with regards to ecological concerns. Sarah was co-curator of the exhibition Strange Creatures: The Art of Unknown Animals (2015) at the Grant Museum of Zoology (University College London) and she organised the symposium Transgressing Boundaries: On Wolves and Werewolves (2015). She is currently editing her PhD research into a book.

Preface

Sam George

This volume of essays presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project (OGOM) at the University of Hertfordshire (soon to be an internationally recognised research centre).¹ The collection connects together innovative research on the cultural significance of wolves, wild children and werewolves from a variety of perspectives as portrayed in different media and genres ranging from folktales and Gothic literature through sound, fashion, film and television to contemporary poetry and visual art.

The book developed from the now legendary conference and series of events entitled ‘The Company of Wolves: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives – Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans’ in August 2015.² OGOM hosted over fifty international speakers, together with invited keynotes from Sir Christopher Frayling, Prof. Garry Marvin, Dr Catherine Spooner, Dr Stacey Abbott, Dr Sam George and Dr Bill Hughes. There was a contribution on wolves from the field of fiction, from the prize-winning novelist Marcus Sedgwick. The idea for the conference came from discussions we were having with two of OGOM's funded PhD students, Kaja Franck and Matt Beresford. Kaja was writing a PhD on werewolves in literature and Matt, researching Byron and the Romantic vampire, had written a book on the European werewolf myth.³ A number of the smaller, related events at the conference were also inspirational and important to the development of the research in this volume. For example, we visited the headstone inscribed ‘Peter the Wild Boy’, in the graveyard of St Mary's Church in Northchurch, the stone marking the Hertfordshire resting place of this famous feral child. We also viewed the plaque erected in the church in his honour. The strand in the book on wolf children developed directly out of the associations that had grown up between OGOM research and the local figure of Peter the Wild Boy. The conference also saw the beginning of our important collaboration with the UK Wolf Conservation Trust.⁴ We invited delegates to directly interact with wolves and, following that, to hear an exclusive talk by members of the Trust on ‘Re-wilding the wolf’. We closed our festival of events with the ‘Lycanthropic Lantern of Fear’ – a magic-lantern show on the theme of the werewolf in which David Annwn Jones took us on a journey to the edges of civilisation and sanity, in a spectacular show presented on a genuine Victorian magic lantern. The imaginative, Gothic element of our research was awakened again here, following our interactions earlier with the actual flesh-and-blood animal, the wolves behind the werewolf myth, via the UK Wolf Trust.

The Company of Wolves received unprecedented attention in the media and a large number of press articles were generated and published locally, internationally and globally. Two of our favourite stories were on BBC News: ‘University to Host International Werewolf Conference’ and ‘Werewolf Conference: The People Seeking the Company of Wolves’.⁵ We inspired articles as far afield and as diverse as the Smithsonian Magazine in the USA and the South China Post. The furore surrounding the research delivered at the conference was celebrated afterwards by Katherine Hughes in The Guardian and we received an acknowledgement from Times Higher Education that we had achieved a first for a UK Academy.⁶

Following the success of this strand of the OGOM project, we collaborated again with the UK Wolf Trust at the ‘Being Human Festival’ in November 2017 in an event entitled ‘Redeeming the Wolf : A Story of Persecution, Loss and Rediscovery’.⁷ We argued that wolves had been hunted to extinction in Britain but they still haunt the human imagination. Stories of the wolf had portrayed a vicious, snarling beast that emerged from the wilderness to attack humankind. The werewolves of popular culture had further fomented fear. But the lost wolf was making a comeback: conservation groups were working to reintroduce the animal to the British countryside. Our event brought together scholars, writers and conservationists to explore how literature, folklore, fairy tale, and film have shaped our perceptions of the wolf and could be impeding its return. Mike Collins, chief ‘Wolf Keeper’ at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust, contributed a piece to accompany a short film on the impact of wolves. This was preceded by a series of illustrated talks (Prof. Garry Marvin (‘lupophobia’), Dr Sam George (‘wolf-children’), Dr Kaja Franck (‘monstrous werewolves’) and Dr Bill Hughes (‘beauties and beasts’). The audience was invited to debate the implications of redeeming and rewilding the much-maligned ‘big bad wolf’ and what the wolf can teach us about being human. I collaborated further with Mike Collins from the trust in an interview with the BBC on the impact of fairy tales on our perception and understanding of the wolf.⁸ These projects and symposia have fed into and inspired this collection, together with an OGOM special issue of Gothic Studies.⁹ In this offshoot, we develop the theme of wolf-children, wilderness and werewolves and revisit the story of the Hull werewolf Old Stinker, who, as serendipity would have it, appeared for the first time since the early twentieth century during the period that we were planning and presenting the conference. He became something of a totem figure for OGOM.¹⁰

This collection then, despite coming under the shadow of the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, is not about undead creatures.¹¹ Instead, it is about the rather disturbing vitality of the werewolf, and other beings which unsettle the distinction between animal and human, whether wolves themselves figuring as representatives of human nature, other shapeshifters or the curious stories of children discovered in the wild and without language – widely thought to be the unique characteristic of human beings. So, we are cheekily stretching the meaning of ‘Open Graves, Open Minds’ away from its obvious suggestions of revenants – the phrase comes from Generation Dead, Daniel Waters's marvellous novel of unlikely romance between living humans and zombies – just so that it can encompass shapeshifters. We would like the phrase to suggest the uninhibited prying into dark secrets, and an even more strained metaphor of consciousness emerging from the invigoration of dead matter.

Notes

1 OGOM maintains a blog and website that is constantly updated with dialogues around related topics and with additional scholarly resources: .

2 The full programme is available on our website: .

3 Kaja gained her PhD in 2016 on ‘The Development of the Literary Werewolf: Language, Subjectivity and Animal/Human Boundaries’. She is a now an even bigger part of the project. Matt is completing his doctoral research. His book on the werewolf myth is The White Devil: The Werewolf in European Culture (London: Reaktion, 2013).

4 The UK Wolf Conservation Trust is based in Reading. Details can be found at .

5 Laurence Cawley, ‘University to Host International Werewolf Conference’, BBC News, 22 August 2015 ; Jodie Smith, ‘Werewolf Conference: The People Seeking the Company of Wolves’, BBC News, 4 September 2015 .

6 Kathryn Hughes, ‘In Our Dog-Eat-Dog World, It's Time for Werewolves’, The Guardian, 30 August 2015 ; Matthew Reisz, ‘Were­wolf Conference Billed as First for UK Academy’, 31 August 2015 .

7 The Being Human Festival is led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. Our event can be found on the BH site: .

8 ‘Little Red Riding Hood Tale Hampers Wolf Debate, Says Academic’, BBC News, 4 November 2017 .

9 Gothic Studies, Werewolves and Wildness special issue, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes, 20.1 (May 2019).

10 For Old Stinker, see Dr Sam George, ‘Why We Should Welcome the Return of Old Stinker, the English Werewolf’, The Conversation, 30 October 2016 ; Sam George, ‘Wolves in the Wolds: Late Capitalism, the English Eerie, and the Weird Case of Old Stinker the Hull Werewolf’, Gothic Studies, Werewolves and Wildness special issue, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes, 21.1 (May 2019); Kaja Franck and Sam George, ‘Contemporary Werewolves’, in Twenty-first-century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 144–57.

11 The Open Graves, Open Minds Project began around 2010 with a very successful conference on vampire narratives, followed by the Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium in 2012, and the monograph and special issue of Gothic Studies in May 2013. There have been further events, and Dr Sam George has instigated an MA module on vampire fiction at the University of Hertfordshire and an undergraduate one on Young Adult Gothic.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Matthew Frost and his team at MUP for enthusiastic support and diligent editing. We are also grateful to all the delegates at the Company of Wolves conference and contributors to this book who made it so unforgettable and seminal. THANK YOU.

We would like to express our gratitude to Sir Chris Frayling for sharing his thoughts on Angela Carter and wolves and for being a long-standing supporter of OGOM, and Catherine Spooner, Stacey Abbott and Garry Marvin for their rare insight and research with bite. Thanks must also be extended to Marcus Sedgwick, whose novel The Dark Horse fuelled Sam's obsession with wolf-children. Wild children have fascinated us both down the years and Sam's session on wolf-children with Marcus at Company of Wolves was one of the highlights of her career.

Thanks to the University of Hertfordshire for hosting the OGOM Project and Company of Wolves conference. Thanks are also due to Sam's colleagues in research at the University of Hertfordshire; in particular, Jeremy Ridgman, Rowland Hughes and Andrew Maunder. We would like to thank Louise Akers and April Wilson of the UH press office, Amanda Phipps and Professor Sarah Churchwell at the Being Human Festival, and Chris O’Brien, the genius behind our impact for the ‘Redeeming the Wolf’ event, and also the BBC for their interest in all the Company of Wolves symposia and events.

OGOM would also like to extend thanks to our UH Humanities helpers at the conference: Daisy, Rachael, Elliot, Janette and Amelia, and to Florence Scott in Creative Arts for her wonderful werewolf sculpture.

Many other people have given support and aided us in our research into wolves and wolf-children. These include but are not limited to Mike Collins and the staff at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust, the Rev. Gordon at St Mary's Church in Northchurch and the staff at Berkhamsted Collegiate School.

Sam would like to send special thanks to Bill Hughes for his inspirational work on the project. The book would never have been completed without his rigorous editing, generosity and support. Kaja Franck was the inspiration behind the project and Sam has fond memories of their conversations about wolves in her role as supervisor for Kaja's PhD. Thank you for lending your boundless energy and lupine expertise to OGOM, Kaja – we are privileged to have you.

Finally, last but by no means least, Sam thanks her sisters, Demelza, Rowena and Caroline, and her nephews and nieces, Miranda, Patrick, Joseph, Luke and Lyra. And to her father, David George, and Jonathan: thank you for making me who I am, for believing in me and for keeping the wolves from my door.

Bill would like to thank Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik, Angela Keane and Hamish Mathison for initiating and guiding him through his academic career. Members of BARS, BSECS and the IGA, along with many other scholars, have all enhanced this through much fruitful discussion. The support of friends including Sarah and Dave Bartlett; Mel and Pete Duxbury, Liz Fox and their lovely families; Martin Green, Kevin Jones, Sue Chaplin and particularly his sister, Caryl, has been invaluable, particularly through difficult times. He owes a huge debt to the beleaguered NHS. Bill would especially like to praise Sam George for shared delights in research and friendship. This book celebrates the memory of Mat Fox and Bill's mother, Barbara Hughes.

This book is dedicated to the wolves and wolf-children who have inspired us, in particular Peter the Wild Boy, whose Hertfordshire grave we visited during the conference, and to our animal friends, gone but not forgotten: Freddie and Jason, Hatty, Buffy and Angel, Morrissey, Spike; and those who continue to delight us in the present: Willow and Teddy, Arrietty, Denny, and Morticia and Gomez (who have made their own delightful contributions to this project despite their aversion to anything vaguely canine).

Introduction: from preternatural pastoral to paranormal romance

Sam George and Bill Hughes

Amidst concerns about our relationship with nature, in a culture informed by Romanticism and a post-Enlightenment doubt about the centrality of humanity, contemporary fictions often turn to the animal and to transitions between animal and human to interrogate what is special about our species. In her Young Adult werewolf paranormal romance Linger, the author Maggie Stiefvater quotes Rilke: ‘even the most clever of animals see that we are not surely at home in our interpreted world’.¹ This captures the amphibious nature of being human, of our embodied consciousness and our status as speaking, interpreting animal. It raises the kinds of questions that the essays in this collection respond to and illuminate. Our contributors examine werewolves, wolves, wild children, and other transitions between culture and nature. The chapters below explore how these themes interact and how they shapeshift around different narrative modes from utopian pastoral to Gothic and romance.

Wolves and wilderness

The history of werewolfism is inextricably bound up with humankind's treatment of wolves.² Peter Stubbe (variously spelled Stump, Stumpf, or Stube), the Werewolf of Bedburg, is a seminal case. He was executed in Cologne in 1589.³ A likeness of a wolf was framed in wood and set above a pole which contained his severed head – a permanent monument to both the killing of the werewolf and the destruction of the wolf. Dead wolves were coveted as trophies in Anglo-Saxon Britain, and King Edgar (959–75) demanded that his Welsh subjects pay him three hundred wolf-skins a year; some criminals were encouraged to pay their debts in wolf-tongues.⁴ English wolves were almost totally eradicated under the reign of Henry VII (1457–1509). Wolves held out in Ireland until the 1700s (though they were extinct in Scotland by the late 1600s).⁵ British and Irish wolves were exterminated much earlier than wolves across Europe; the total extinction there was not completed until the 1800s. The result is a contemporary landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present. The spectre-wolf or werewolf has replaced the actual flesh-and-blood animal. This contemporary werewolf is far from being a curse; perhaps it is a gift, for it can reawaken the memory of what humans did to wolves, initiate rewilding debates and redeem the big bad wolf that filled our childhood nightmares, reminding us that it is often humans, not wolves or the supernatural, that we should fear.

Yet wolves have long been the archetypal enemy of human company, preying on the unguarded boundaries of civilisation, threatening the pastoral of ideal sociality and figuring as sexual predators. On the other hand, with their complex pack interactions they have often served as a model for society. Lately, this ancient enemy has been rehabilitated and reappraised, and rewilding projects have attempted to admit them more closely into our lives. Contemporary narratives have aided or hindered this assimilation in various ways.

The blurring of the boundary between animal and human recurs throughout literature. Wolves in particular, ambiguously social animals yet savage outsiders, predators on the community and disruptors of the pastoral, have long played a versatile role in exploring these topographies. They have a close relationship with the pastoral, which in its literal sense concerns the tending of domestic animals, and the wolf is the shepherd's eternal foe from at least the Old Testament onwards (then there is all the additional allegorical weight that arrives with Christianity, with Christ as shepherd of the human flock). The wolf of tradition preys on the pastoral – quite literally, attacking the sheep that the pastoralist cultivates. The wolf is also well known as one who threatens female virtue: hence ‘wolf whistles’ and Perrault's warning to innocent girls at the end of his version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.⁶

The idea of pastoral goes a long way back, of course.⁷ But our account begins in the eighteenth century, where so much of modernity begins. Then, in the present day, we argue that contemporary werewolf fictions take on peculiarly modern versions of pastoral that emerged in the Enlightenment and that are challenged in various ways now. In that period, writers and thinkers explored certain themes about the origins of language and society, and the complex interplay between the human and nature or the animal.

The eighteenth century is also the moment when vampires emerged from the twilight of superstition to become literary monsters. These creatures play a significant part in the development of werewolf narratives. In our discussion below, we want to avoid the idea of some timeless, universal werewolf archetype that has always existed throughout all cultures (though they are certainly more persistent and have more archaic roots than vampires).⁸ We are concerned mainly with the artistic transformation of the folkloric material, although the latter is of interest. Ideals of animality and nature in the eighteenth century display a continuity with those of today, though significant shifts have taken place, and contemporary representations of the wolf are often employed in reaction to Enlightenment.

Wild children in the company of wolves

With this cultural history of the wolf as predator on the pastoral, it seems paradoxical to discover the wolf itself in the role of a pastoral figure. Yet wolves may also be founders and nurturers of culture, raising Romulus and Remus, or fostering into sociality those abandoned feral children that so fascinated Enlightenment thinkers as they probed into the origins of society and language.⁹

The eighteenth century was a fertile time for new ideas about language. Hans Aarsleff points to the uniqueness and intensity of these inquiries; Nicholas Hudson notes a crucial shift to theories of language as intersubjective and dialogical rather than private.¹⁰ Bernard de Mandeville, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are significant figures who all speculated that human language originated in a primal dialogue.¹¹

Accounts of wild children feature prominently in these inquiries. Condillac examined many wild children accounts, particularly one of a child thought to have been raised by bears.¹² He too imagined a primal couple, one of each sex, lost in the desert and creating language out of necessity (or perhaps passion). The Scottish Enlightenment thinker James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, took the ideas of Condillac and Rousseau further. Monboddo had visited Marie-Angélique Leblanc and Peter the Wild Boy. Marie-Angélique was found in the woods of Champagne in 1731 and eventually taken into care and socialised by nuns. Peter was found naked and void of speech in the forests of Hanover in 1725 and brought over to England, becoming a court celebrity and an object of interest to thinkers such as the Rousseauvians Richard and Maria Edgeworth. ‘Man is a creature of art’, claimed Monboddo, and that we need to separate what is natural from what is artificial. He notoriously thought that orang-utans were humans, giving credence to travellers’ tales of them living in society, building wooden huts and enslaving women. Crucially, many of these wild children were thought to have been raised by wolves (and such stories persisted long after this period).

Rousseau explores two dialogic ideas of origins, suggesting that children invented language in dialogue with their parents, but also setting forth a theory of dialogue rooted in the passion of a primal couple. But where Mandeville had seen a development of increasing sophistication (though ambivalently spiced with vice), Rousseau sees decline and corruption, leading to the manipulative speech of contemporary civilisation. Casting Rousseau's ideas as regressive back-to-nature fantasy is a simplification. Yet there is an element of pastoral nostalgia in his thoughts on nature and civilisation.

The term ‘preternatural pastoral’ in the title of this Introduction serves to emphasise the Enlightenment utopianism of pastoral as image of not a lost Golden Age but a reaching beyond nature, that projection into the future and transcendence