The Craft Of Lafontaine

This study provides a detailed account of the "Fables", including humour, the representation of animals, the literary qualities and the "moraliste" core. Maya Slater brings to light veiled satirical attacks, allusion to forgotten works and literature, and traces the obscure currents of thought, all this in the service of explicating the "fable" element.

This study provides a detailed account of the 'Fables', including humour, the representation of animals, the literary qualities and the 'moraliste' core. Dr Slater brings to light veiled satirical attacks, allusion to forgotten works and literature, and traces the obscure currents of thought, all this in the service of explicating the 'fable' element.

Inspired new translations of the work of one of the world's greatest fabulists Told in an elegant style, Jean de la Fontaine's (1621-95) charming animal fables depict sly foxes and scheming cats, vain birds and greedy wolves, all of which subtly express his penetrating insights into French society and the beasts found in all of us. Norman R. Shapiro has been translating La Fontaine's fables for over twenty years, capturing the original work's lively mix of plain and archaic language. This newly complete translation is destined to set the English standard for this work. Awarded the Lewis Galantière Prize by the American Translators Association, 2008.

Depicts 44 historic armed soldiers from 1286 B.C. to 1945, pairing adversaries on facing pages. Provides brief historical backgrounds for depictions.

La Fontaine's witty and sophisticated animal fables are among the greatest poetic works in French. Christopher Betts's new translations match the inventiveness of the original. This generous selection, including half of the originals, is accompanied by superb illustrations by Gustave Doré, a contextualizing introduction and other features.

Peter Sahlins’s brilliant new book reveals the remarkable and understudied “animal moment” in and around 1668 in which authors (including La Fontaine, whose Fables appeared in that year), anatomists, painters, sculptors, and especially the young Louis XIV turned their attention to nonhuman beings. At the center of the Year of the Animal was the Royal Menagerie in the gardens of Versailles, dominated by exotic and graceful birds. In the remarkable unfolding of his original and sophisticated argument, Sahlins shows how the animal bodies of the menagerie and others (such as the dogs and lambs of the first xenotransfusion experiments) were critical to a dramatic rethinking of governance, nature, and the human. The animals of 1668 helped to shift an entire worldview in France — what Sahlins calls Renaissance humanimalism — toward more modern expressions of Classical naturalism and mechanism. In the wake of 1668 came the debasement of animals and the strengthening of human animality, including in Descartes’s animal-machine, highly contested during the Year of the Animal. At the same time, Louis XIV and his intellectual servants used the animals of Versailles to develop and then to transform the symbolic language of French absolutism. Louis XIV came to adopt a model of sovereignty after 1668 where his absolute authority is represented in manifold ways with the bodies of animals and justified by the bestial nature of his human subjects. 1668: The Year of the Animal in France explores and reproduces the king’s animal collections — in printed text, weaving, poetry, and engraving, all seen from a unique interdisciplinary perspective. Sahlins brings the animals of 1668 together and to life as he observes them critically in their native habitats — within the animal palace itself by Louis Le Vau, the paintings and tapestries of Charles Le Brun, the garden installations of André Le Nôtre, the literary work of Charles Perrault and the natural history of his brother Claude, the poetry of Madeleine de Scudéry, the philosophy of René Descartes, the engravings of Sébastien Leclerc, the trans_fusion experiments of Jean Denis, and others. The author joins the non_human and human agents of 1668 — panthers and painters, swans and scientists, weasels and weavers — in a learned and sophisticated treatment that will engage scholars and students of early modern France and Europe and readers broadly interested in the subject of animals in human history.