The story of the mother-and-daughter goddesses Demeter and Persephone has seized the imagination of people in every age, from ancient times to the present. Considered today by many to be the archetypal myth for women, it touches on timeless themes in every life, such as the male-female relationship, love between women, initiations into puberty and old age, the mother-daughter bond, death, and ecological renewal. Christine Downing has combined essays, prose, poetry, and even performance art with her own insightful commentary to shed new light on the myth's ancient meanings and to offer new insights in its implications for contemporary men and women.

Transformation in the Writing, A Case of Surrender-and-Catch further develops the concepts first presented in Surrender and Catch (1976) and applied to sociology and its history in Survival and Sociology (1991) and autobiography in O Loma! (1989). This idea involves the recognition of the unprecedented nature of the present time in the history of humankind and the planet, a time when we ourselves, rather than Nature or the Deity, can annihilate both ourselves and our planet. Surrender' is nonlinguistic (or prelinguistic), prepredicative', prephenomenal', and involves suspending or bracketing' the world, calling it into question. This is the best any individual can do, in view of the point of crisis at which we are now. In Transformation in the Writing Wolff explores how his hypothesis of Surrender(-and-Catch) bears on aspects of autobiography (emigre status, field work), sociology of knowledge, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and on attitudes to our time.