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

The Writing & Rhetoric series method employs fluent reading, careful listening, models for imitation, and progressive steps. It assumes that students learn the best by reading excellent, whole-story examples of litereature and by growing their skills through imitatiion. Each excercise is intended to impart a skill (or tool) that can be employed in all kids of writing and speaking. The excercises are arranged from simple to more complex. What's more, the exercises are cumulative, meaning that later exercises incorporate the skills acquired preceding exercises. This series is a step-by-step apprenticeship in the art of writing and rhetoric. Fable, the first book in the Writing & Rhetoric series, teaches students the practice of close reading and comprehension, summarizing a story aloud and in writing, and amplification of a story through description and dialogue. Students learn how to identify different kinds of stories; determine the beginning, middle, and end of stories; recognize point of view; and see analogous situations, among other essential tools. The Writing & Rhetoric series recovers a proven method of teaching writing, using fables to teach beginning writers the craft of writing well.

Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.

A retelling of 15 of Aesop's fables and five other famous stories.

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.