The Aesop's Fable Paradigm is a collection of essays that explore the cutting-edge intersection of Folklore and Science. From moralizing fables to fantastic folktales, humans have been telling stories about animals—animals who can talk, feel, think, and make moral judgments just as we do—for a very long time. In contrast, scientific studies of the mental lives of animals have professed to be investigating the nature of animal minds slowly, cautiously, objectively, with no room for fanciful tales, fables, or myths. But recently, these folkloric and scientific traditions have merged in an unexpected and shocking way: scientists have attempted to prove that at least some animal fables are actually true. These interdisciplinary chapters examine how science has targeted the well-known Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" as their starting point. They explore the ever-growing set of experimental studies which purport to prove that crows possess an understanding of higher-order concepts like weight, mass, and even Archimedes' insight about the physics of water displacement. The Aesop's Fable Paradigm explores how these scientific studies are doomed to accomplish little more than to mirror anthropomorphic representations of animals in human folklore and reveal that the problem of folkloric projection extends far beyond the "Aesop's Fable Paradigm" into every nook and cranny of research on animal cognition.

This is a study of a curious and neglected facet of literature, in which the author traces the development and the uses of fable in Euopean literature, from Aesop and the Greeks to the revival of fable in contemporary fiction. This is the first serious study of fable in literature.

A hybrid-genre carnivalesque of trauma and rebirth, Fablesque harnesses the power of old tales to dispel the disenchantments of women and animals in the #MeToo era. Blending fiction and myth, personal essay, prose poetry and verse, and spanning scales from local to celestial, chanelling voices of the voiceless and the mighty, Fablesque speaks to the apocalyptic moment of the present. Harnessing folktale, fairy tale, and collage, the poems embrace constraint as a starting point for liberating new content and for addressing constructions and intersections of gender, race, power, and time

Presents fifty verse fables by seventeenth-century poet Jean de La Fontaine in side-by-side French and English.

The works of Jean de La Fontaine have invited an extraordinary variety of readings in the three centuries since their composition. By engaging selected fables and tales with contemporary notions of intertextuality, reader reception theory, and grammatology, Figures of the Text raises questions about what “reading La Fontaine” meant in the 17th century, and what it means today. The study integrates a theory of reading and a theory of textual production by drawing attention to those aspects of the text that figure writing and reading, for instance: scenes of reading; other modes of writing (emblems, hieroglyphics); inscriptions and epitaphs; proper names; and citation (proverbs, maxims, allusions); the relation of represented orality to textuality, of textuality to corporeality, and of textuality to the visual arts (ekphrasis); and the archaeology of textual figures, such as labyrinths, textiles, and veils.

Encounters with the Other brings together a range of eighteenth-century texts in which the exploration of lingua incognita figures as a prominent topos . Drawing mostly on a corpus of French texts, but also including a number of works in English, Martin Calder attempts to realign well-known texts with more canonically marginalized works. The originality of the perspectives offered by this book lies in the comparative reading of works not previously conjoined. Encounters with otherness are marked by a transgression of the limits of language, occurring when language becomes alien or unfamiliar. Alterity may take various forms: a foreign language, a familiar language marked by the traits of foreignness, something unrecognizable as language, or even one’s own language breaking down, as in madness. Unfamiliar language may be produced by a foreigner, by a child who cannot yet speak, in extreme cases by something unrecognizably human, in all cases by an agency somehow marked by difference. Narratives of encounters with otherness have written into them narratives of the discovery of the self. Implicitly informed by the reading techniques associated with literary theory, Encounters with the Other offers an insightful commentary on issues surrounding colonialism, cultural difference, gender and the importance of language to identity. Martin Calder’s work challenges certain Eurocentric notions and exposes the problematic links between Enlightenment rationality and colonial expansion. This book is of interest both to undergraduate students and to academic researchers, and to a more general readership concerned with understanding the relationship between Europe, the ‘West’ and a wider world.

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