Leiden University Student Repository

Officier, Skye Amberley (2017)

Fear or Fascination? Representations of the Wild Man in Middle English Literature

Master thesis | Literary Studies (MA)

This thesis explores twelfth to fourteenth century attitudes toward continuity and change in medieval stories about the Wild Man. Can these stories, dealing with the human-animal border, be seen as an expression of discomfort? Could the Wild Man, like Ovid's poetry, be interpreted as a fascination with hybridity and metamorphosis? Or should we conclude that the Wild Man both frightens and fascinates in the way horror movies simultaneously repel and attract modern man? To provide a contrast to the half-way creature of the Wild Man, this work explores the way of presenting animals in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It then analyses the twelfth century Vita Merlini, and the fourteenth century Sir Orfeo and Ywain and Gawain and argues that these texts, at least partly, express an unease with change and the loss of self.

Wild Man

Metamorphosis

Medieval

Animals

Change and Continuity

Body

Author

Officier, Skye Amberley

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

English

Supervisors

Murchison, K.A.

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en