Between the paws of the tender wolf: authorship, adaptation and audience

The time seems ripe for a re-evaluation of the ways Angela Carter’s ‘The Company of Wolves’ has been adapted. Adaptation studies has evolved in recent years, shedding new light on the ways works are adapted, translated, or reimagined. The Company of Wolves, in all its forms (story, radio play and film), has frequently elicited negative emotions and negative responses from readers, listeners and viewers who are not quite sure what to make of it. This analysis examines its relationship to horror, to contemporaneous and subsequent werewolf films, and to Dark Romance, examining its complex negotiations of gender and sexual identity, including femininity, masculinity, heterosexuality and the ways these are inflected by various contexts and intertexts