This edited collection explores the concept of metamorphosis across art history, image theory, literary studies, and philosophy. By examining the shifting meanings of metamorphosis in nature, the arts, and technology, this book reveals the traces and ecstases of matter and body in transformation. It asks how images associated with elemental statesterrestrial, aquatic, and etherealhave commingled throughout history, creating poetic fields of morphic resonance.
The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the wonders of nature, the occult dimension of nature's artistry, and the vitalizing power of metamorphosis as a principle of life and art. The authors critically engage with philosophical concepts such as genesis, movement, hybridity, and trans-corporeality to reveal unexpected dimensions of metamorphosis, explore the miracles of transmutation of matter in ancient thought, and use new theoretical tools to examine modern ideas of evolution and the metaphysics of mixture addressed within the aesthetics of wonderment.
Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION. Advances in Metamorphosis Theory and the
Aesthetics of Wonderment: From Sympoiesis and the Worlds Rhapsody to
Contemporary Preposterous Metamorphosis.- Part I: The Fragile Skin of the
World A Morphic Texture of Ineffabilia and Chthonic Alchemy.
Chapter 2:
CORAL Fleur De Sang.Troubled Origins of Art as Metamorphosis: Natures
Eikonopoíêsis and its Enigmatic Opacity.
Chapter 3: Towards a Hermeneutic of
Cave Spaces. Water, Silence, Echo.
Chapter 4: Porous incrustations:
Exploring trans-corporeal encounters between stone, shells, fossils, and
humans.
Chapter 5: A Stone and Yet Not a Stone: Alchemical Resonance in
North Italian Quattrocento Painting.
Chapter 6: ANARCH: Immersion In The
Alchemical Nigredo. Readings From ANARCH by Gast Bouschet.- Part II: Being
Desires Being: Worlds Rhapsody and its Ecstatic Chorology.
Chapter 7:
Mimicry A (complicated) love story: Notes on imitation as a poetic strategy
to becoming one with the world without dying.
Chapter 8: SYMPOIESIS: Rondo
Dance within the Hive A Choreography of Natures Marvel.
Chapter 9
Metamorphosis and Music.
Chapter 10: Polyrhythm and the spatializing of
sounds: A chorological hypostasis of metamorphosis.- Part III: Pathic
Metamorphosis: A Matter of Affect and Sensation.
Chapter 11: On the
Metamorphoses of Mimesis: Nietzsches Parable.
Chapter 12: The Bodies´
Becoming Through Their Metamorphoses.
Chapter 13: Lemmerzs Impossible
Sculptures. An exploration of metamorphosis and disfiguration in Lemmerzs
sculptures.
Chapter 14: The Metamorphosis of Ella M: Transformation and
Alteration in the Photographs of Deborah Turbeville.
Chapter 15:
Becoming-Painting: Bonnard Dernier Autoportrait.- Part IV: Preposterous
Metamorphosis A Wonder to Behold: From Hybrid Metamorph to Occult Synthetic
AI.
Chapter 16: Imagery of the Underworld: Humor and Horror in
Sixteenth-Century Italian Grotesques.
Chapter 17: A Folkloric Turn? Staging
Medieval Magic Ballads in the Context of Climate Collapse.
Chapter 18:
Metamorphoses Myth to Movement: Occultural Reenactments in Contemporary
Dance.
Chapter 19: Occult body: the obscuring and revealing of
human-AI-materialities.
Chapter 20: From Water to Screen: Metamorphosis in
Haejung Jungs Video Art.
Nicoletta Isar, docteur ès lettres, is Associate Professor Emerita at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. A scholar of Comparative Imagination and Cultural Imaginary Theory, she is the author of The Dance of Adam (2011), Elemental Chorology (2020), and Phenomenology, New Materialism, and Advances in the Pulsatile Imaginary: Rites of Disimagination (2024).
