List of images
Note on translations and references
Introduction: 'Mighty Magic'
1: Rabelais's monsters: Andromeda, natural history, and romance
2: 'Monstrueuses guerres': Ronsard, mythology, and the writing of
war
3: Montaigne's children: metaphor, medicine, and the
imagination
4: Corneille's Andromeda: painting, medicine, and the politics of
spectacle
5: Pascal's monsters: angels, beasts, and human being
6: Racine's children: the end of the line
Epilogue: Between testimony and hearsay
Bibliography
Index
Wes Williams was born in Rangoon in 1963; he spent his childhood in
India, and his teenage years in Croydon. He moved to Oxford as
student, studied French and German at St John's, and spent two
years studying in Germany (one year in Hamburg, and another in
Berlin). He was Fellow in French at New College for 15 years before
moving to his present position at St Edmund Hall. Alongside his
academic life, he also works as a writer and director for the
theatre, and in
film.
This is a book born of long and deep reflection on its subjects'
writings (especially Montaigne's), and attends to both the tiny
stitches of an essay, play or fiction, and to the larger design. As
Williams maps the linkages and the meanings to which they lead, he
can listen with a tuner's sensitivity to the internal rhymes in a
line of Racine and to their equivalents in Ted Hughes's rendering,
or, zooming out, can give a sweeping overview of the poliical
context. His methods persuasively combine material historicity with
some inspiration from "universal" deconstructionism and
psychoanalysis; the results are rich and layered, and show how
barren theoretical purism can be.
*Marina Warner, Times Literary Supplement*
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