-
Title
-
en_US
A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction
-
Description
-
en_US
Lee Rourke
-
Creator
-
en_US
Rourke, Lee
-
Date
-
2016-08-26T13:38:56Z
-
en_US
2016-02
-
en_US
2011
-
Date Available
-
2016-08-26T13:38:56Z
-
Date Issued
-
en_US
2011
-
Abstract
-
en_US
"I have returned to this book not regarding that I had already catalogued it without looking into it. This is not the first time that this has happened: too many books and too many years! I will start with my more recent (2020) assessment and then include my comments made in 2016. My temptation with this recent paperback is to take to task specific statements. Reading a good review online in Hackney Citizen helped: https://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2012/06/27/a-brief-history-of-fables-from-aesop-to-flash-fiction-review/ Now I would say that what Rourke may do best of all is to alert us to the staying power of the fable genre. Rourke finds it appearing in literary territories we may not suspect, including flash fiction. Some of the things I would argue with probably group around Rourke's tying Aesop to the ""mythic."" He finds a great structuring sense that the Aesopic has given to life in age after age. He sees the life of Aesop as a sacred story expressing deeply held beliefs. A part of this story for Rourke is the Aesopic ""no"" saying that Aesop does not know where the journey will end. He sees Aesop's speechlessness as a basic trauma out of which his fabling grows. For him, the Aesopic ""no"" counters the Socratic. I find Socrates rather to be the master of the ""I do not know,"" and I do not see fables or even the life of Aesop digging that deeply into our values, but this book is making me think again. I can quibble on smaller things. Phaedrus, for example, did not write ""rhymes."" By contrast, I am intrigued with the thought that L'Estrange was the start of fables associated with the education of children. That is certainly what Croxall feared! I find Rourke perceptive in his coverage of La Fontaine. There is plenty more here, and I am happy to have made a start. What I wrote earlier follows. I look forward to reading further into this paperback of some 178 pages. I suspect that my sense of fable will give me trouble with the third and fourth of the four chapters. The first chapter is devoted to Aesop's life, work, and influence. The second handles Marie de France, Rumi, William Caxton, and Jean de La Fontaine. The third deals with modern fabulists and the modern novel: Robert Walker, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Thomas Bernhard. The fourth handles post-fabulists, meta-fabulists, and flash fiction. The cover's picture of a stack of books looks suspiciously like the shelves in my collection, but I wonder if those books really exist: ""The Tortoise Finds a Hair""; ""The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and other Cross Dressing Creatures""; ""A Foxes Guide to Lapine""! My!"
-
Identifier
-
en_US
10832 (Access ID)
-
Language
-
en_US
eng
-
Publisher
-
en_US
Hesperus Press
-
en_US
London
-
Subject
-
en_US
PN980.R68 2011
-
en_US
Secondary
-
en_US
Title Page Scanned
-
Type
-
en_US
Book, Whole