Ladies into Foxes: Narratives of Transformation

This chapter combines the focus on intertextual transformation in Chap. 2 with more literal metamorphoses, specifically transformations between fox and human. Sarah Hall’s Mrs Fox and Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman focus on the relation between physical and literary transformation, where changing bodies parallel changing texts. The second section highlights the way encounters with foxes lead to psychological transformation, whether in the posthuman approach of Emma Geen’s The Many Selves of Katherine North, the focus on individual change in Paula Cocozza’s How to Be Human, or the global scale of Aminatta Forna’s Happiness. Each novel, in very different ways, explores the relation between language and bodies, and suggests the importance of change as the basis of any interspecies relationship.