This book focuses on how metamorphosis figures in three formative configurations in the Western tradition: the classical, the biblical, and the scientific. It brings the history of transformative change from the eighteenth century to the present.

General Introduction: Metamorphosis: A Phenomenology Antiquity and Archetypes: Introduction to Part I 1. The Transformations of Ovid's Medea (Metamorphoses vii. 1-424) 2. Lynx-stone and Coral: 'Liquid Rocks' between Natural History and Myths of Transformation 3. Proteus and Protean Epic: From Homer to Nonnos 4. Arboreal Myths: Dryadic Transformations, Children's Literature, and Fantastic Trees Christianity and Classicizing: Introduction to Part II 5. Of Donkeys and D(a)emons: Metamorphosis and the Literary Imagination from Apuleius to Augustine 6. Adonis as Citrus Tree: Humanist Transformations of an Ancient Myth 7. Defacing God's Work: Metamorphosis and the 'Mimicall Asse' in the Age of Shakespeare 8. Phantastica Mutatio: Johann Weyer's Critique of the Imagination as a Principle of Natural Metamorphosis Science: From the 'Post-Metamorphic' to the Posthuman: Introduction to Part III 9. Our Mind Is the Ancient Proteus': Proust, the Poets, and the Sea 10. Horror in a Covered Platter': H. P. Lovecraft and the Transformation of Petronius 11. Transforming the Experience of War in the Fiction of Marcel Aymé, René Barjavel and Michel Tournier 12. The Parabola Paradox: Transformation and Science Fiction 13. Epilogue