Aesop's Fables Research Articles

The Social Context in Aesopic Fables: Utopias and Dystopias

Abstract Aesopic fables constitute an important case in folk and popular literature. This genre went through various stages of development; its plasticity, pedagogical dimension, and mainly its ability to convey messages through an indirect and pleasant way prompted many to take interest in it, reading, adapting, or even creating new fables. As a result, fables became a favorite topic in literature and, especially, children's literature through many and various adaptations, translations, and metanarratives. In this paper, considering fables as an early form of utopic/dystopic discourse, we aim to demonstrate some cases of such references through examples taken from the corpus of Aesopic fables.

Evaluation of a school-based, experiential-learning smoking prevention program in promoting attitude change in adolescents.

INTRODUCTIONSchool-based tobacco control programs exhibit great variety. Our study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an experiential learning smoking prevention program in facilitating knowledge acquisition, forging healthy attitudes, and decreasing intention to smoke.METHODSA school-based intervention-control study was implemented during the 2016–2017 academic year among middle-school students in Athens, Greece. The experiential learning intervention was delivered using an interdisciplinary approach, bridging excerpts from ancient classical Greek myths, Aesop fables and ancient classical literature (Aristotle, Herodotus, Plutarch, Xenophon, Homer’s Epics), with their decoded archetypal symbols applied in a smoking and tobacco control paradigm. An anonymous self-administered questionnaire was used at baseline and at follow-up at 3 months to evaluate program effectiveness.RESULTSA total of 351 students participated in our study; 181 (51.6%) in the intervention group and 170 (48.4%) in the control group. The mean age of student participants was 13 years (SD=0.96). Students in the intervention group were more likely to improve their knowledge of the adverse effects of smoking, develop attitudes against smoking and report a negative intention to smoke in the first year following the intervention, compared to the control group.CONCLUSIONSThis study provides evidence that school-based experiential learning smoking prevention programs improve smoking-related knowledge, enhance anti-smoking attitudes and reinforce negative intentions toward tobacco products.

Learned Fable, Living World: Artistry, Knowledge and Attention to Nature in Two Aesopic Paintings by Joannes Fyt

Now better known as a hunting painter, the Antwerp animal specialist Joannes Fyt (1611–1661) also produced several depictions of Aesopic fables. A notable feature of Fyt’s fables is their attentiveness to the appearances and behaviors of animals and how they inhabit their environment. Focusing on two paintings by Fyt featuring poultry birds, this essay uses period fable books, a key discussion of fable by Erasmus, and zoopoetic theory to explore how these works address both the allegorical realm of fable and a tangible living world that was increasingly coming under investigation from natural history and related modes of inquiry.

Picturebook Adaptations of Aesop Fables: An Analysis of Morrison and Pinkney\u2019s Adaptations of Three Classic Tales

This article examines the reconstruction of human foibles in picturebook adaptations of three popular Aesop’s fables: “The Ants and the Grasshopper”, “The Lion and the Mouse”, and “The Hare and the Tortoise”. Adopting adaptation and globalectics perspectives, the author illustrates how social hierarchy is deconstructed in these fables where the authors use anthropomorphic animals to moralize about the human condition. Thus, although the adaptations reiterate lessons from the original source material, they deliberately undermine and/or expand the lessons by integrating sociocultural signifiers that situate Black aesthetics at the core of the narratives. The article examines six picturebook adaptations by award-winning artists, Toni and Slade Morrison, and Jerry Pinkney.

The Fox and the Lion: Investigating Associations between Empathy and Emotion Perspective-Taking in Aesop's Fables

Empathy is essential in story comprehension as it requires understanding of the emotions and intentions of the characters. Our study aimed to evaluate the sensitivity of an emotional perspective-taking task using Aesop’s Fables in relation to empathy. Participants ( N = 301) were presented with 15 short fables and were asked to rate on a Likert scale the intensity of the emotions they would feel adopting the perspective of one of the characters (offender, victim) or the observer’s perspective. The given emotions were anger, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, joy, trust, and anticipation. A data-driven approach revealed that participants’ responses were related to the content of each fable, i.e. whether the offender tricked/hurt the victim or whether the victim managed to avoid the offender’s plot, suggesting successful emotional perspective-taking. Participants also seemed to sympathize with the victim rather than the offender, demonstrating affective sharing processes. Further, participants with high empathy scores exhibited stronger negative emotions from the victim’s perspective compared to those with low empathy, independently of their level of distress. As observers, subjects with both high empathy and distress experienced the strongest negative emotions compared to subjects with low empathy and/or distress. Finally, our task seemed to not be influenced by gender effects. We might therefore suggest that the Aesop’s Fables could be employed in an emotional perspective-task to tap onto different empathy components, thus providing an indirect instrument to study empathy.

Tvær dæmisögur Esóps og latnesk skrifaravers í formála Adonias sögu og tengsl þeirra við latínubrotin í Þjms frag 103,104 og AM 732 b 4to

The author of this article conclusively traces the source of the two Aesopic fables retold in the prologue to Adonias saga to the medieval collection of Latin fables known as Anonymus Neveleti (alias Romulus elegiacus), fragments of which are preserved in two Icelandic vellum bifolia (Þjms frag 103 and 104) that probably originate from the Benedictines monastic houses of North Iceland. In a review of various ancient and medieval collections of Aesop’s fables, the author concludes that the unknown Icelandic author of Adonias saga must have been familiar with the two fables in this particular Latin version, even though his Icelandic rendering of them is free and likely based on memory. A parallel to a Latin couplet cited in the prologue is furthermore identified in a bilingual encyclopædic manuscript, AM 732 b 4to, also associated with the northern Benedictines. The author of the article suggests the possibility that the incorporation of two Aesopic fables in the prologue to Adonias saga, a riddarasaga, is an indication that such sagas ought to be interpreted like fables, that is not only read as entertainment but also as ethical instruction.

Angus Fletcher. <em>Wonderworks. The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature</em>

Angus Fletcher. <em>Wonderworks. The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature</em>

Füchsische Poetologie. Zur Spiegelfiktion im Reynke de Vos (1498)

Abstract The Middle Low German Beast Epic Reynke de Vos (1498) is about two legal proceedings against the fox Reynke, who is charged by the other animals with the tricks he played on them. When he is sentenced to death, Reynke defends himself by delivering speeches that are constructed as described in ancient rhetoric. Part of those speeches is Reynke’s lie about his treasure, which he would give to the lion if he pardoned him. Reynke describes three pieces of jewellery as part of this made-up possession, one of which is a mirror. When Reynke describes it, he also tells Aesopic fables that are carved into its wooden frame. His fictional artefact, especially the interplay of its specific material and the content of the fables told, has a poetological level. In his description, Reynke hybridizes the political discourse of the early modern period, in which the virtue of prudentia becomes more and more important, with the rhetorical competence to deliver speeches and tell fables. In his fiction of the mirror he draws up a poetological draft that combines the role of a rhetor in court with his well-known properties of being clever and cunning. By describing the artefact, Reynke shows how to use rhetorical strategies, especially to tell fables, as an instrument to gain acceptance and to acquire political influence.

ANCIENT GREEK LANGUAGE IN PRE-SCHOOL EDUCATION THROUGH AESOP’S FABLES WITH THE CONTRIBUTION OF ICTS - AN INTERVENTION PROGRAM

In this paper we present an educational intervention that took place in kindergartens of Athens during 2016-2017. It was intended to bring children in touch with the Ancient Greek language and art in a playful way, which included Aesop's fables set to music and the contribution of ICTs. Children had the educational experience through specific visual and perceptive exercises in which they participated, came in touch and understand Aesop’s fables in Ancient Greek language, which they sang and played with the help of specific educational software. Article visualizations:

Greener grass or sour grapes? How people value future goals after initial failure

Across six experiments (N = 1304), people dealt with failure by dismissing the value of future goals. Participants were randomly assigned to receive good or poor feedback on a practice trial of a cognitive test (Studies 1–3, 5–6) or their academic performance (Study 4). Those who received poor (vs. good) feedback predicted that they would feel less happy about a future top performance. However, when all participants received a top score on the actual test they became equally happy, regardless of initial feedback. That is, initial failure made people underestimate how good it would feel to succeed in the future. Inspired by Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes, we term this phenomenon the “sour-grape effect”: A systematic tendency to downplay the value of unattainable goals and rewards. Mediation analyses suggest that the low happiness predictions were a self-protective maneuver, indicated by apparent denial of the personal and future relevance of their performance. Moderation analysis showed that people high in achievement motivation constituted the main exception, as they predicted (correctly) that a big improvement would bring them joy. In a final and high-powered experiment, the effect generalized from predicted happiness to predicted pride and gratitude. Crucially, the sour-grape effect was found repeatedly across two different countries (USA and Norway) and multiple settings (lab, field, online), including two pre-registered replications. In line with the principle of “adaptive preferences” from philosophy and cognitive dissonance theory from psychology, the results suggest that what people want is restricted by what they can get.

Some Current Publications

Some Current Publications Allison Y. Gibeily JANE BARKER See DELARIVIER MANLEY (Choi) APHRA BEHN Armstrong, Philip. "'Surprising, Rare, Unconceivable': Animal Wonders in the Exotic Tradition." Ariel, vol. 50, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1–24. Armstrong details the use of exotic animals in creating a discourse of wonder, arguing specifically that wonder is not only a "system of meaning, knowledge, or belief," but is more so a "structure of feeling" in which that same knowledge is "held in suspension" (3). Further, he distinguishes between the immediate response of wonder when one encounters a "marvel" and the use of that response to commodify wonderful objects and enlist them in an imperialist, capitalist project. Taking interest in bestiary tales and tracing their presence from classical philosophy to early Christian theology and eventually fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travel narratives, Armstrong then turns to an analysis of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Seeing Behn's menagerie of exotic animals as "a glossy prospectus that invites further investment in plantation agriculture" and all the horrors that come with it, Armstrong's article closes by tracing these same methods in twentieth and twenty-first century novels. Cooper, Karol. "Dice, Jesting, and the 'Pleasing Delusion' of Warlike Love in Aphra Behn's The Luckey Chance." In Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift, edited by Holly Faith Nelson and James William Daems, 139-159. Amsterdam University Press, 2019. Cooper's chapter traces the embedded critique of the cuckolding comedy genre and its detrimental social effects in Aphra Behn's play The Luckey Chance. Focusing specifically on the dice game toward the end of the play, [End Page 153] where Sir Cautious wagers a night with his wife Julia against his opponent Gayman, Cooper argues that Behn exposes the danger of likening sexual violence to "diverting games of social warfare" (143). In so doing, Behn proposes a darker, alternative sort of comedy in which emotional pain is present on the stage and borne by all characters involved. Purcell, Carey. From Aphra Behn to Fun Home: A Cultural History of Feminist Theater. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Purcell examines the roles that women have played both on and off the stage in her chronological history of feminist theater. Inquiring first and foremost as to how we define feminist theater – whether it is productions by women, about women, or even male-authored works restaged with a feminist bent – Purcell shifts her focus in her second chapter to understand how women writers like Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre capitalized on new laws allowing women to perform on stage to challenge societal expectations during the Restoration. As she argues, these "female wits" complicated the assumed, gendered role of unmarried women, widows, and divorcees. Spencer, Jane. "Behn's Beasts: Aesop's Fables and Surinam's Wildlife in Oroonoko." In Reading Literary Animals, edited by Karen L. Edwards, Derek Ryan, and Jane Spencer, 46-65. New York: Routledge, 2020. Given that Behn wrote captions for a 1687 revised edition of Francis Barlow's Aesop's Fables shortly before publishing Oroonoko in 1688, Spencer outlines how the genre of the fable influenced Behn's descriptions of animals in Surinam. Specifically, by depicting the seventeenth century as a time when "natural history… has not completely eschewed the marvelous" (48), Spencer reimagines the titular character's encounters with animals to be just as much politically charged metaphor as they are scientific description or didactic fable. See also POLITICS & WAR (Hudson); WOMEN WRITERS (Min) ROBERT BOYLE See SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (Remien) JOHN CARLETON See MARY CARLETON (Lucenko) MARY CARLETON Lucenko, Kristina. "'Meerly My Own Free Agent': Liberty and Civility in The Case of Madam Mary Carleton." Early Modern Women 14, no. 1 (2019): 50–74. Lucenko reconsiders Mary Carleton's 1663 pamphlet The Case of Madam Mary Carleton in light of emerging ideas of selfhood and contract from theorists like Hobbes and Locke. As she suggests, Carleton counters her husband John's accusations of bigamy and impersonation by assuming three different "subject positions" in her pamphlet: "Political Carleton," who focuses on mutual obligations of ruler and subject, "Cavalier Carleton," who appeals to courtly culture while simultaneously critiquing it, and "Civil Carleton," who demonstrates a keen understanding of British...

Fabulæ Æsopiæ, non Æsopi. Recherche sur la terminologie fabulaire jusqu’à Phèdre

This paper investigates the terminology referring to the fable in Antiquity until Phaedrus who first drew a definite distinction between Aesop’s fables (fabulæ Æsopi) and Aesopic fables (fabulæ Æsopiæ). It tries to understand if the Phaedrian denomination marks a turning point in the history of fable ¢ making a genre out of it ¢, and to what extent this approach denotes on Phaedrus’ behalf a new generic awareness.

A Dung Beetle's Victory: The Moral of theLife of Aesop(Vita G)

AbstractTheLife of Aesopis an entertaining yet profound account of Aesop's life dating from the first to second centuriesad. Although it is widely agreed that theLife of Aesopmay be read as a ‘metafable’, there has been, in my view, a widespread and perversely negative interpretation of the supposed moral of this life story: that ‘pride comes before a fall’. This supposed moral is not borne out by the ending, in which Aesop's prophecies of doom prove to be correct, the Delphians are thrice punished for executing Aesop, and Aesop himself achieves everlasting fame as a storyteller. In this paper, I will argue that a more fitting moral for theLife of Aesopis that ‘even the weakest may find a means to avenge a wrong’. This is the moral that accompanies the quintessentially Aesopic fable of the dung beetle, the hare, and the eagle in which a tiny dung beetle triumphs over a powerful adversary. This fable is pointedly narrated by Aesop to the Delphians just before he is put to death. By reading theLife of Aesopas an exposition of this fable, I will demonstrate that Aesop, just like the dung beetle, is not the loser but the ultimate victor.

Los coyotes de Esopo: pedagogía, humanismo y traducción cultural en el colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco en las Fábulas en lengua náhuatl

El artículo presenta el análisis de un caso concreto del momento inicial de transculturación pedagógica y traducción cultural propiciada por los colegios franciscanos de San José de los Naturales y Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco en el virreinato de la Nueva España a partir del estudio de la transmutación de los animales de la Fábulas de Esopo traducidas en lengua náhuatl. El trabajo parte de un comentario de los testimonios conservados y del valor pedagógico de la fábula en la época del humanismo y termina con un comentario de la fábula “El chivo y el coyote” con el que se ejemplifica el ejercicio de traducción cultural que maestros y discípulos llevaron a cabo en el estudio de Tlatelolco durante las décadas centrales del siglo XVI.

" The child poetry at Syria Poetry story as a pattern"

most people who work at the field of education interested of poetry. The writer from the teachers were saying the poem at songs interviewing, poems and skits which carry the national nature and its effects on psychology it make sense of the national, so it was the beginning of child poet the same at Egypt and Syria... it had grew up in the arms of education and more of whom wrote about that were from teachers and educators for this reason their written were educational and didactic: The Syrian poets done and as first stage like the Egyptian poets done and as the writer of stories when they transport many tales like Aesop's fables and Levantine stories. They don’t inspired from the heritage by doing the legends and superstitions at their poetry with Tyranny of ideal trend rhetorical feature and preaching clear at sensitive and you can't recognized between the childhood. The multi-stages only at many attempts and didn't appear any critical was the condition of all literature of children in the beginning at the Arabic nation but the searcher after that likely on the beginnings poetic at Syria for child was at the mid of thirty of the last century.

Acetylcholine boosts turtle sense of direction

![Graphic][1] In the classic Aesop's fable, the tortoise triumphs over the smug hare by patiently making its way along the race track. While reptiles such as turtles and tortoises are famously ambling voyagers, how they learn their routes is less well known. One chemical that may be required

Social Knowledge and Spiritual Insecurity: Identifying "Witchcraft" in Classical Greek Communities

Social Knowledge and Spiritual InsecurityIdentifying "Witchcraft" in Classical Greek Communities Esther Eidinow 1. "witchcraft": an old story A female magos who promised to make incantations that calmed the anger of the gods did a good trade, and from these activities, made a handsome living. On these grounds, certain people charged her with innovating in divine matters, and they accused her and condemned her to death. A certain person, seeing her leaving the court, said to her: "You claim to be able to calm the anger of the gods; how come you could not persuade ordinary mortals?" Someone might use this tale against a wandering woman, who although she promises greater things, proves incapable of ordinary achievements.1 This essay begins with this Aesopic fable, because I want to argue that the gunê magos it depicts belongs to the (semantic) family of "the witch." This does not mean that I regard this term as indicating, straightforwardly, a universal category. But the conference that generated this essay was based on the assumption of the diachronic and cross-cultural conceptual power of witchcraft beliefs and practices, which encompass both local and global meanings and whose historical trajectory extends back to ancient Mediterranean cultures. The breadth of our coverage in both the conference and volume is not meant to suggest that a direct resemblance can be assumed between one set of phenomena and another across distances of time, place, and culture; nor do we [End Page 62] intend to claim that this etic term "witch" can simply encompass or displace the emic understandings of the subjects of analysis. Rather, it was and is intended to describe a family resemblance; and, in this essay, the phenomena I will use it to describe share in "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing; sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail."2 In addition, and importantly, my use of this term is also intended to prompt recognition and exploration of difference; raising in particular, and to the theme of this collection of essays, questions about the nature, role, and context of specific narratives—and, indeed, vocabulary. I will not be concerned here with etic differences between, for example, sorcery or witchcraft;3although I do think that the difference to which this terminology alludes is of interest for Classical scholarship, as a prompt towards consideration of the emergence of conscious and unconscious forms of supernatural harm achieved by ordinary mortals (for example, we can trace in the ancient sources a discourse concerning the relationship between envy, supernatural harm, and the emergence of the concept of occult aggression that we can loosely label the "evil eye").4 In this essay, however, I restrict myself to the evidence concerned with the exercise of more technical powers, in which supernatural powers were understood to be evoked through ritual expertise. Returning to the Aesopic fable with which this essay started, we can see how this story provides a vivid tableau that illustrates the ways in which accusations of illicit ritual practice—"witchcraft"—could develop in ancient Greek, probably Classical, culture; it also highlights, very succinctly, a number of themes of this essay.5 First, it alerts us to local social dynamics. As the [End Page 63] fable relates, the female magic user or gunê magos is a popular figure, insofar as her skills are clearly in demand (e.g., , "she did a good trade and from these activities made a handsome living"), but she is also hated and abused. Her remarkable success is followed by a downfall that is engineered by people who remain anonymous, "certain people" who bring these accusations; while "a certain person" speaks to the woman as she leaves the court, and appears, from what has been said, almost to enjoy what has happened. What is it that provokes these reactions? The Greek says she was charged "" or "on these grounds," and "these" could refer either to the woman's ritual practices, or her remarkable success. The "certain person" who crows over her as she leaves the court alludes both to the woman's claim to possess supernatural power and to the ways in which the verdict can be read as having falsified that claim. But...

The Gift of Logos. TheLife of Aesopand Socrates’ Poetic Initiation

This paper explores a crucial, if neglected, point of comparison between Plato’s Socrates and the Life of Aesop, namely their shared relationship with the Greek tradition of poetic initiations. The combined study of how Socrates and Aesop fit into that tradition provides an invaluable vantage point to explore the generic boundaries of Socratic dialogues and Aesopic fables. Aesop’s initiation as described in version G of the Life, with its emphasis on Aesop’s newly acquired ability to speak, proves crucially connected with a defining feature of Aesopic fables, namely the major role of speaking animals. Moreover, the scene closely recalls a number of passages in Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates echoes the Dichterweihe tradition in terms of both poetic inspiration resulting in the ‘invention’ of dialogue and conversion to writing. Combined together, the passages under examination from Plato and from the Life amount to a literary manifesto pointing to the canonisation of prose genres, revolving, respectively, around the gift of logos and dialogos. They also suggest that an early and version of the Life might have provided Plato a foil to emphasise Socrates’ Apollonian piety in opposition to Aesop’s impiety in the Life.

<em>In Ictu Oculi</em> Reflections on “Wolf and Beast” by Berechiah Hanaqdan in the Context of Its Contemporary Versions in Medieval Fable-Lore

Abstract Mishlei Shu'alim is a twelfth-century collection of about one hundred Aesopic fables, written in rhymed Hebrew by Berechiah ha-Naqdan. After a survey of the fabulist's work, life and possible sources of inspiration, the article presents the theory that Fable 36, Wolf and Beasts, is composed of two different parts. The fable's first part deals with a voracious wolf being accused by the other animals at the lion's court of justice and is sentenced to avoid hunting for two years. In the second part when he sees a sheep he blinks 730 times, each blink representing in his mind a 24-hour period, thus determining that 2 years had passed. The first part is probably based on a fable that has no antecedent written version, but which is possibly echoed in a contemporary text by Odo of Cheriton. The second part, concerned with the wolf's fraud and witticism, is compared with Marie de France's Fable 50 and other Latin sources where the wolf takes a vow to abstain from eating meat during Lent. Upon seeing a sheep, he pretends it is a salmon so he may devour it without regret. While in Marie de France's version the wolf is entirely cultivated and the sheep is merely an idea, in Berechiah and the other versions, the animals’ images alternate between civilization and nature.

Aesop's fables adaptation: an alternative for fostering values, oral production and listening comprehension

This article aims at presenting the experiences acquired from the project titled “Aesop’s Fables Adaptation: An Alternative for Fostering Values, Oral Production and Listening Comprehension”, carried out at a public school in Tunja with fourth graders. The project related to the adaptation of Aesop´s fables, which were included in the school´s curriculum topics and implemented through different workshops. This was done in order to develop values awareness and English skills. Throughout this project, most of the students participated, were very attentive class after class, and enjoyed the activities. The students began to use the vocabulary they learnt from the fables for communicative purposes. In the same way, students were aware of moral aspects, the implicit values in each story, and the fables’ importance in their own lives