ABSTRACT
While the term transubstantiation carries a specific, context-bound association, the concept also raises the issue of how terms or 'substances' may paradoxically lose their substantiality in the process of being transformed into something else. Given my training as an English literature specialist whose 'specialism' seems sometimes frighteningly but also exhilaratingly dispersed across different bodies of knowledge, the opportunity to explore not only the 'trans' of transubstantiation but also 'metaphors' of transubstantiation, comes as something of a relief. To understand transubstantiation in a metaphorical sense is to multiply one's options, in such as way as to release the term from its particular, religious orbit of meaning into such varied analogues, metonyms and metaphors as translation, transition, transsexuality, magic, adaptation, metamorphosis and alchemy. Several essays in this collection make use, as this essay also will, of these various analogues: translation and transsexuality, for example, are the subjects of Emma Parker's essay; adaptation, from novel to film, and from script to theatrical production, is discussed in Mario Curreli's and Carla Dente's essays respectively; Francesco Gozzi analyses the use of the Eucharist as a metaphor for artistic creation in the work of Joyce and Eliot, while Marina Spunta's essay examines oral story telling as a form of transubstantiation.
