A World of Fables


By Brenda Deen Schildgen and Georges Van Den Abbeele

$24.95

A unique collection of 94 fables, A World of Fables includes work from many parts of the world. The book draws from both oral and written traditions and includes ancient as well as very modern stories.The authors’ introduction sets the fable as a narrative form existing in virtually every culture and historical period. The authors then trace the history of the fable from its populist roots, through its use as a pedogogical tool, to its subsequent history as political allegory.

The illustrations are reproductions of lovely engravings originally published in the 1755 edition of Fables de la Fontaine, reprinted by permission of the Bancroft Library.

This is a book for anyone interested in the rich variety of story-telling arts.

Paperback, 164 pages, black and white, notes, bibliography, 2003, ISBN 1-881896-27-7, LC 2003001135
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Brenda Deen Schildgen is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. She has published widely on the European Middle Ages, specializing in medieval southern Europe, hermeneutics and interpretive theory, reception theory, and narrative theory. Her books include Crisis and Continuity: Time in the Gospel of Mark; Power and Prejudice; The Reception of the Gospel of Mark, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a co-edited volume; Pagans, Tartars, Jews, and Moslems in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Dante and the Orient.

Georges Van Den Abbeele is a scholar of early modern French literature and contemporary continental philosophy. He taught at Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Harvard and Miami Universities before coming to the University of California, Davis in 1990, where he chaired the Department of French and Italian from 1997 to 2001 and currently directs the Davis Humanities Institute and Humanities Programs.

He is the author of Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau and of Utopias of Difference: For a Genealogy of the French Intellectual (forthcoming from Stanford University Press). He is also the translator of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Postmodern Fables, and Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History. He is the co-editor with Tyler Stovall of French Civilization and its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race. He has also guest-edited a number of special issues: on travel literature (L’Esprit Créateur, 1985; Sites, 2001), on Lyotard (Diacritics, 1984), and on censorship (Diacritics, 1997).

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“The fable was the sage’s word of honey or steel to award or slay the good or bad beast. Imagine a book of fables spinning elegantly from the ancient Indian Panchatantra to Colette and James Thurber, from Aesop to Calvino, from Leonardo da Vinci to Leon Trotsky, from the medieval Spaniard Juan Ruiz of the Book of Good Love to a Chinese tale of a vegetarian cat. Schildgen and Van Den Abbeele take us on this joyful romp through the whole world’s animal fables that reveal, in imaginative word and metaphor, highs and lows of human behavior.

The editors’ brilliant introduction reveals the historical, political, and ethical picture of the animal fable and how it served as a corrective eye to societies from African villages and Maya jungles to the repressive realm of Louis XIV when wolves and lambs were Jean de la Fontaine’s secret analogical critics. From spider to elephant and orangutan to eagle, here is a chance to crawl, spring, and fly around the planet and come home wiser and happier. A must read.”

—Willis Barnstone, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Author of The Other Bible


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