Ethereal Lovers and Beastly Brides

This class will explore the motif of the supernatural or animal lover in literature. We will follow manifestations of this trope through various literary forms, as well as various language traditions, beginning in Greek antiquity with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and moving from traditional Scottish ballads to Romantic poetry to the earliest literary fairy tales, and finally, to the work of some post-modern writers of the fairy tale. We will pay particular attention to how the trope is taken up in different literary forms—both in poetry and prose—and how it manifests in the context of various literary movements. Additionally, we will examine the effect of this motif on the categories of gender and sexuality. How are representations of gender and sexuality complicated or called into question when the figures represented fall outside the category of the human? What can we learn about the formation of identity in a particular literary context through examining these non-human figures? Our conversations will be structured by significant texts from feminist and queer theory.

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

• Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
• Multicultural Courses: Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP)