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.

A collection of animal fables told by the Greek slave Aesop.

This book coins the term ‘imperial beast fable’ to explore modern forms of human-animal relationships and their origins in the British Empire. Taking as a starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, it examines literary reworkings of these fables, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, in relation to the global politics of race, language, and species. The imperial beast fable figures variably as a key site where the nature and origins of mankind are hotly debated; an emerging space of conservation in which humans enclose animals to manage and control them; a cage in which an animal narrator talks to change its human jailors; and a vision of animal cosmopolitanism, in which a close kinship between humans and other animals is dreamt of. Written at the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial studies, this book proposes that the beast fable embodies the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while also covertly critiquing them. It therefore finds in the beast fable the possibility that the multitudinous animals it gives voice to might challenge the imperial networks which threaten their existence, both in the nineteenth century and today.

The ancient form of the animal fable, in which the characteristics of humans and animals are playfully and educationally intertwined, took on a wholly new meaning after Darwin's theory of evolution changed forever the relationship between humans and animals. In this original study, Chris Danta provides an important and original account of how the fable was adopted and re-adapted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors to challenge traditional views of species hierarchy. The rise of the biological sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century provided literary writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and J. M. Coetzee with new material for the fable. By interrogating the form of the fable, and through it the idea of human exceptionalism, writers asked new questions about the place of the human in relation to its biological milieu.

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.

An illustrated adaptation of twelve animal fables first told by the Greek slave Aesop.