Author: Horst Dölvers Publisher: ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
This study examines more than one hundred fables in prose and verse, most of them original in content, some highly original in form. Author Horst Dolvers refutes the assumption that the fable declined in popularity after 1800 and the days of La Fontaine, Swift, Gay, and Lessing. Most of the texts studied in this book are taken from Victoria collections and poetry anthologies, and are presumably unknown. An extensive documentation presents verse fables according to the different functions they served - in humor, satire, and education, religious and philosophical speculation, and as drawing-room entertainment full of erotic innuendo. Mere stock-taking is not this book's intent, however. Its second part focuses on three Victorian books, applying semiotics (including theories of discourse). A review essay of Lord Lytton's Fables in Song (1874) by Robert Louis Stevenson contains perceptive remarks on the "post-Darwinian fable," a newly developing variant turning away from "old stories of wise animals or foolish men" to confront "truths that are a matter of bitter concern." Lytton's reveries deserve rediscovery as narratives that skillfully manipulate their readers by a hierachical ordering of discourses - nudging them into ideological positions that, to many readers, must have appeared commonsensical. At the same time, they tend to sap the complacencies of common sense. A picture book by Walter Crane, an Aesop in limericks (1887), shows the illustrator's art as no less Houdinian. Finally, Anna Sewell's children's classic Black Beauty, if simple, should be read as anything but plain; its speaking silences make the reader feel that man and beast are divided rather than united by their ability to communicate. The horses, shown as capable of speaking like humans, do not share man's multiplicity of discourses - nor consequently, the duplicity resulting from their use.
Author: Ann Tatlock Publisher: ISBN: 9781624690563 Category : Fables Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Step into a world of wonder and learning in these enduring fables of ancient Greece. You'll come face to face with the wrath of the Olympian gods. You'll meet unforgettable characters with all-too-human shortcomings, including the conceited Narcissus, the greedy King Midas, and the disobedient Icarus. Come, listen and learn as their choices lead to some surprising outcomes.
Author: Richard J. Hill Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1317062175 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text explores the genesis, production and the critical appreciation of the illustrations to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is one of the most copied and interpreted authors of the late nineteenth century, especially his novels Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These interpretations began with the illustration of his texts in their early editions, often with Stevenson’s express consent, and this book traces Stevenson’s understanding and critical responses to the artists employed to illustrate his texts. In doing so, it attempts to position Stevenson as an important thinker and writer on the subject of illustrated literature, and on the marriage of literature and visual arts, at a moment preceding the dawn of cinema, and the rejection of such popular tropes by modernist writers of the early twentieth century.
Author: Valerie Shaw Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317872789 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
Throughout this text, Valerie Shaw addresses two key questions: 'What are the special satisfactions afforded by reading short stories?' and 'How are these satisfactions derived from each story's literary techniques and narrative strategies?'. She then attempts to answer these questions by drawing on stories from different periods and countries - by authors who were also great novelists, like Henry James, Flaubert, Kafka and D.H. Lawrence; by authors who specifically dedicated themselves to the art of the short story, like Kipling, Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield; by contemporary practitioners like Angela Carter and Jorge Luis Borges; and by unfairly neglected writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Joel Chandler Harris.
Author: Charles Stewart Given Publisher: DigiCat ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 40
Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "A Fleece of Gold; Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece" by Charles Stewart Given. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Author: Terence Whalen Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400823013 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 515
Book Description
Edgar Allan Poe has long been viewed as an artist who was hopelessly out of step with his time. But as Terence Whalen shows, America's most celebrated romantic outcast was in many ways the nation's most representative commercial writer. Whalen explores the antebellum literary environment in which Poe worked, an environment marked by economic conflict, political strife, and widespread foreboding over the rise of a mass audience. The book shows that the publishing industry, far from being a passive backdrop to writing, threatened to dominate all aspects of literary creation. Faced with financial hardship, Poe desperately sought to escape what he called "the magazine prison-house" and "the horrid laws of political economy." By placing Poe firmly in economic context, Whalen unfolds a new account of the relationship between literature and capitalism in an age of momentous social change. The book combines pathbreaking historical research with innovative literary theory. It includes the first fully-documented account of Poe's response to American slavery and the first exposé of his plot to falsify circulation figures. Whalen also provides a new explanation of Poe's ambivalence toward nationalism and exploration, a detailed inquiry into the conflict between cryptography and common knowledge, and a general theory of Poe's experiments with new literary forms such as the detective story. Finally, Whalen shows how these experiments are directly linked to the dawn of the information age. This book redefines Poe's place in American literature and casts new light on the emergence of a national culture before the Civil War.
Author: Dr. Seuss Publisher: HarperCollins Children's Books ISBN: 9780007141982 Category : Children's stories, American Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
With its unique blend of hilarious rhyme, jaunty rhythm and wacky illustrations, this delightful book combines three of Dr. Seuss's most charming fables, each one teaching us a salient lesson in coping with life's problems. The ever popular Lorax tells the tale of the wicked Once-ler who devastates a beautiful paradise by cutting down all the Truffula Trees, just so he can knit thneeds that noboby needs. The message is loud and clear that we should take better care of our environment. Learning to face up to life's problems -- rather than trying to run away from them -- is the message amusingly told in I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, and Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? reminds us all that there is always someone, somewhere, worse off than ourselves.
Author: Horst Dölvers
Author: Aesop
Author: Ann Tatlock
Author: Richard J. Hill
Author: Valerie Shaw
Author: Chris Danta
Author: Ambrose Bierce
Author: Charles Stewart Given
Author: Terence Whalen
Author: Dr. Seuss