Animal Tales Research Articles

Reviews: History and the Media, Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with ‘The Arcades Project’, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books, Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance, Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage, Secret Shakespeare, Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, Language and

Reviews: History and the Media, Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with ‘The Arcades Project’, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books, Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance, Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage, Secret Shakespeare, Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, Language and

One-Smoke Stories

One-Smoke Stories Is A Collection Of Folk Tales from Native American, Spanish Colonial, mestizo, and European American peoples of the Southwest retold in the enthralling words of one of the bestselling writers of her day, Mary Austin. One-Smoke Stories introduces us to a multicultural treasury of character types: lovers, hunters, bandits, shepherds, miners, ranchers, homesteaders, missionaries, government officials, and supernatural beings. Through folk tales, animal tales, and other genres of popular lore, Mary Austin acquaints readers with the spirituality, humor, and intercultural conflicts of the Southwest. Some stories are overtly political, critiquing the homesteader's conquest of nature, the assimilation policies of Christian missionaries, and the abuses of colonial government. Others use marriage, friendship, community, or religion to illustrate the values and traditions of people in the mainstream and at the margins of American culture. Originally published in 1934, One-Smoke Stories is one of several early-twentieth-century works that bridged the oral and literary realms by intertwining folklore and fiction. Introduced by Noreen Groover Lape, this new edition of One-Smoke Stories, like Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, stands as an important work in the multicultural canon.

The Crying of Lost Things

By means of gesture, or of deputy or direct speech, things have their say in the eighteenth century. Whether these speaking objects are animate, such as Laurence Sterne’s ass, Gulliver’s horses and Sir William Temple’s parrot; or whether they are ingenious mechanisms such as Professor Faber’s Euphonia or Erasmus Darwin’s talking head; or merely inert, such as the feathers, slippers, pins, and coins whose autobiographies are so prolific in this period, they all claim to possess in some degree the attributes of reason, speech, and soul that human beings have reserved (and still reserve) as peculiarly their own. The speech of the nonhuman may arise from sympathetic identification, from the manipulation of hidden levers, from metempsychosis, or from what Michel de Certeau calls an event in the throat. Generically it draws upon animal fables and tales of metamorphosis and overlaps with what is now known as the itnarrative. I’m going to suggest that another source of nonhuman language is to be found in advertisements, specifically advertisements for lost property. Furthermore I want to claim that under certain circumstances the rhetoric of crying lost things, and of lost things crying, is imitated by humans calling for their kind: Lucy Lockit and Polly Peachum, for example, when in The Beggar’s Opera they advertise the loss of Macheath; or Moll Flanders when she cries the loss of herself.

The Continuum encyclopedia of animal symbolism in art

The famous animal tale of the six blind men and the elephant, in which each of the blind men describes the elephant differently, depending on the part of the creature touched, has been interpreted in ways nearly as varied as the blind men's descriptions. In each of these various interpretations, the story demonstrates the use of animal metaphors to express important issues. As Claude Ltvy-Strauss famously said: are good to think. The focus of the encyclopedia is on animals and their symbolism in diverse world cultures and in different eras of human history. Most entries on particular animals begin with brief zoological information, which includes the animal's scientific name and classification as well as its range, habitat, and behavior. Main, general entries on cultural, chronological and geographical areas include cross-references to specific cultures discussed in greater detail. Other broader entries address the significance of animals in their own environments (e.g., architecture of animals, tools used by animals), and still others deal with animals in the human sphere (e.g., pet animals, zoo). The ways that people think about animals and what people do to and with animals as a result are discussed in more theoretical entries, such as anomalous animal and complimentary duality. Some entries deal with the ways in which animals are depicted (composition, X-ray images). The work concludes with a Bibliography, and Index of Names, and an Appendix of Animal Taxonomy.

Oral Narrative Studies in China

Oral Narrative Studies in China Mark Bender (bio) Oral narratives fall into two broad classifications in China. The first is “folk literature,” and the second is urban-based narratives performed by professional or avocational performers. The field of study focusing on oral literature (koutou wenxue) is concerned with traditional genres that tend to be lumped under rather general though not necessarily descriptive headings such as folktale, myth, legend, children’s stories, animal tales, narrative poems, epics, and so forth. These categories, introduced into China from the West (to some extent via Japan) by the early twentieth century and modified to suit Chinese needs by scholars such as the late Zhong Jingwen, are still the basis of the text-based approach to oral literature followed by most scholars and cultural workers in China today. It is assumed that most of these forms of narrative (as well as folksongs) exist and are collected among rural people. In recent decades, massive folklore collecting projects have resulted in the anthologizing of a huge number of texts (rather highly censored in the early decades after 1949) in a wide variety of venues, including newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and book series. At times some were used to promote political agendas and many texts have found their way into a variety of popular media. Moreover, a large number of works have been published as “inner-circulating” documents for scholars only since 1949. In recent years, as strictures have relaxed, most scholars prefer the public forums. Though the bulk of published materials are “text-based” (sometimes with little or no description of the performance process and context), in recent years a small number of younger, well-positioned Chinese scholars have turned a critical eye to developments in folklore studies in Europe and the United States and have begun experimenting with a bundle of approaches that, if considered from a distance, might be called the “oral pragmatics” school of Western folklore/folk narrative studies. The body of theory constituting this syncretizing approach (which seems pragmatic both in the sense of descriptive methodology and ethnopoetic politics) wields a theoretical tool-kit that includes Parry-Lord oral-formulaic theory, a [End Page 236] performance/contextual/ethnography of communication approach, Lauri Honko’s ideas on the “folklore process” and the “process of textualization,” reception aesthetics, John Miles Foley’s ideas on “traditional referentiality” (and his syncretic approach), and research on the psychophysical implications of performance. Among the most active of the younger Chinese scholars and editors is Chao Gejin, a scholar of the Mongol ethnic nationality in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His groundbreaking work on the oral poetics of Mongol epic singing (2000) is the first full-length study of an ethnic minority tradition in China to fully utilize aspects of many of the approaches just listed, introducing translations and explanations of key terms in the text. Major folklore journals in China have in recent years also included translations of what they perceive as key works of Western folklore studies, including a number of key chapters on basic approaches translated from Foley’s Teaching Oral Traditions (1998). Other innovative voices include those in the productive Bamo Sisters’ Studio, a small group of Yi nationality sisters (including Bamo Ayi and Bamo Qubumo) who have helped bring an international profile to the large Yi nationality in southwest China through their studies on oral and written poetic narrative, ritual specialist texts, a recent museum exhibit on material culture at the University of Washington, and a Harvard conference in 2001. The situation of Yi folk narrative studies is exceptional, however, as many groups have a low profile within as well as outside of China and funding for local research organs is inconsistent nationwide. It will be interesting to see where this oral pragmatics approach goes in China, given the large number of local oral traditions still available for study, despite the increasing waves of modernization. Another large body of oral or oral-connected narrative also exists in China, though its items tend to be classified as “performing narrative arts” (quyi) or, when written, as forms of “vernacular literature” (suwenxue). These narrative arts, many of which were prosimetric in form and had a musical dimension...

"I'm thinking how nothing is as simple as you guess": Narration in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh

"I'm thinking how nothing is as simple as you guess":Narration in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh Leona W. Fisher (bio) "I liked this book—and I usually hate dog stories! I don't even like dogs!" complained several of my students in a recent college class. "Well," I proposed, "why don't we try to find out why? What are the book's special, even unique, characteristics that enable such a positive response, even from twenty-year-old skeptics like yourselves?" This analysis grows out of that attempt, which has taken me in various narratological directions. The more I explored the book's persuasiveness, alone and with my students, the more I concluded that this book stands virtually alone in its bravery: culturally (although written by a suburbanite, it is set in the West Virginia hills), ideologically (it sets up virtually insoluble ethical dilemmas, which it refuses to solve easily, and certainly not in a formulaic way), linguistically (like many contemporary African-American books for children, it incorporates dialect not only into its dialogue but into its narrative and provides no grammatical correctives) and, most important, narratologically. The story is experienced, told, "filtered," and analyzed by eleven-year-old Marty Preston—without benefit of authorial intervention, or even the interaction of an addressee.1 With no overt or extended narrative frame (such as, "Now I will tell you a story," "Once upon a time," or "Last year") and very little subsequent spatial or temporal "double consciousness" for the reader's benefit, Marty simply launches into his story by specifying a concrete day and event: "The day Shiloh come" (11).2 For those of you not familiar with this extraordinary tale, Shiloh is a dog, and his "coming" changes Marty's—and the other Prestons'—life forever. The terrified beagle has been beaten and abused by his owner, Judd Travers, and he finds refuge in the protective, loving arms of the smitten Marty, who learns to lie and scheme and rationalize (and even to subvert his community's value systems) in the process of discovering a plan to keep the dog. In the process, Marty offers many pre-adolescent observations for the first time, not the least of which is this: "You once get a dog to look at you the way Shiloh looked at me, you don't forget it" (32)—an insight many readers seem to have difficulty forgetting as well. But what produces this effect so unequivocally and particularly in a story that might easily fall into the clichés of the "boy and his dog" convention? How does the author avoid the obvious pitfalls of sentimentality, condescension, "cuteness," or even anthropomorphism that have characterized so many animal tales for middle readers? The answer, I believe, is simple: through the outrageous and brilliant use of a technique seldom used in fiction for any age group: the sustained internal monologue presented almost exclusively in the present tense.3 The selection of the angle-of-vision from which a story is told may be the clue to the effectiveness of children's "classic" stories from Alice in Wonderland through Tom Sawyer, the Little House books, Charlotte's Web, to the Great Brain books, The Chocolate War, Harriet the Spy, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Whether, as in Barbara Wall's formulation, these books are told in the "Single Address" (addressed to the child alone) or "Double Address" (addressed alternately to the child and the adult) of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, or in the supposedly more sophisticated "Dual Address" (addressed to the child and the adult simultaneously) of the last one hundred years, each of them presents an appropriate point of view and voice which establish a desired rhetorical relationship and intimacy—with many readers across time and space. No "classic" text, however, has attempted a plausible retelling of a story from the perspective of the very moment in which it is happening.4 The conventions of written narrative tell us, after all, that the past tense is the present (with "had," the past perfect, to signify the actual past, and "would" as the predictive future, bringing the story up to the time of the...

This Work of Never Stopping

This Work of Never Stopping "The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart." —Stanley Kunitz The cat is with child. Night upon night she kills, then preens in her gorged instinct. The murdered rabbit looks surprised, his decapitated glance, sidelong on my shovel, still trying to remember the story he once embodied: what the cat craved, the animal tale in which one's heart is eaten, another stayed home and had black kittens, given up except the runt run over by a car that never stops. Never stops. This work of never stopping. The early Lenten earth is so hard, I dig the graves with an axe. On a stump against the tree line my son in blaze orange stands with his book and hatchet. With the voice I've taught him he is calling the dog away from the foraging deer. Too many and not enough food. The hunter is a kindness they can't outrun. The rabbit is dead. The cat is with child. —Joseph Bathanti 69 ...

Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture

This volume brings together 22 scholars to look at the complexities of children's culture. Chapters focus on a variety of issues, many of which are hotly disputed - from what it means to be a child to the pace by which a child leaves childhood. The contributors ask questions about how the gender symbolism of children's culture is constructed and resisted. What happens when women rewrite (or illustrate) nursery rhymes, adventure stories, and fairy tales told by men? How do the socially-scripted plots for boys and girls change through time and across cultures? Have critics been blind to what women write about masculine topics? Can animal tales or doll stories displace tired commonplaces about gender, race and class? Can different critical approaches - new historicism, narratology, or post-colonialism - enable us to gain leverage on the different implications of gender, age, race and class in our readings of children's books and children's literature?

Les textes étiologiques dans la tradition orale des Slaves orientaux

Etiologic texts in eastern slavic tradition. The introduction is an attempt to offer a typology of the Eastern Slavic corpus of etiologie texts. The specificity of this corpus is double. Firstly, some thèmes developped in it are not represented in other etiologie traditions. Secondly, certain thèmes are hère more richly presented and in a wider range of variants, as for instance the female thème. Depending on what genre (fairy taie, animal tale, legend inspired by the 'Folk Bible') the texts are related to, it is possible to distinguish différent areas of diffusion.

Stories from the Marshall Islands: Bwebwenato Jan Aelon Kein

Among Marshallese the ri-bwebwenato (storyteller) is well known and respected, a living repository and transmitter of traditional history and culture. Here are ninety folktales and stories of historical events, collected and translated into English during the third quarter of the twentieth century. They include tales of origins, humanlike animals, ogres, and sprites - some malevolent, some playful. Many are presented in the original language and are amplified by extensive commentary.

The Best of Texas Folk and Folklore 1916-1954

This volume of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society contains information about folklore in Texas and Mexico, including folk songs and ballads, ghost stories, Mexican animal tales, sermons, stories about games and celebrations, folklore of Texas plants, and information about folk remedies. The index begins on page 349.

Angela carter's animal tales: Constructing the non‐human

(2000). Angela carter's animal tales: Constructing the non‐human. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 35-57.

Animal Antics in Children's Literature

Every adult whose has spent time in an early childhood setting can detail accounts of children who are drawn to animals. I remember clearly a diminutive 5year-old who draped a white knit shirt over her hair each morning she came to our center. As she tossed her head and headdress from side to side, it quickly became clear that she was transforming herself into a horse with a lovely, flowing mane. Everything about horses intrigued her, but nothing sustained her attention more than equine-related stories and books. She would ask to hear them over and over again; stroke the pictures or illustrations; and "read" the stories to others. Through literature she learned about the workings of horses and her own world. She developed a sense that she could learn about things she loved through a good story or an informative book. Children's literature is replete with animal stories. Such tales are sought out, relished, and relived-and sometimes even carried as fond memories into adulthood! Beaty (1994) suggests that carefully crafted animal tales may provide much more than factual information about the creatures with whom we share the planet. Perhaps young listeners and readers are drawn to animal stories and characters because they are afforded opportunities to study themselves at a safe distance. As such, children can test their conjectures, try out their secret thoughts and plans, and undergo the vicarious thrill of being scared, heroic, loyal, silly, or even mischievous, all in the context of a good story or book. The types of animal stories and general topics most likely to be appreciated by children are tied closely to their age, developmental level, and specific individual interests. • Very young children respond best to books that have clearly defined, brightly colored pictures or illustrations of familiar animals. Brief, plotless idea or concept books may be enhanced and enjoyed when the central character is an animal (Tomlinson & Lynch-Brown, 1996). • Between 2-4 years of age, children begin to show a growing appreciation for animal characters engaged in daily routines, involved in simple plots, and presented in interesting and/or humorous ways. Rapidly developing language skills are nurtured by concept books that promote naming and labeling of objects, actions, and people (or animals who are portrayed as humans) (Tomlinson & Lynch-Brown, 1996). • Picture storybooks become the heart of literature experiences for children between the ages of 4-6 years. Children's animal-based literature is often among the most cherished during this period of development. These support a growing enthusiasm to decode informative illustrations, learn to read, and make use of familiar words and word patterns. Literature becomes an important vehicle to find out more about the world, its animal occupants, and their behaviors (Tomlinson & LynchBrown, 1996). Below are some of the newest animal stories to grace the bookshelf. Consider sharing these with the young literature and animal-lovers in your life.

Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities.

Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities.

Tantri Reliefs on Javanese Candi. By Marijke J. Klokke. Leiden: KTTLV Press, 1993. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde No. 153. Pp. xiv, 323. Appendices, Bibliography, Index, Glossary, Figures.

This work fulfills the long-standing need for a comprehensive study of the animal tale reliefs found on a significant number of Javanese candi. As someone who has in the past struggled with identifying these reliefs and understanding their history and role in ancient Javanese society, I can attest to the immense effort that lies behind a work like this. Thus I have read this study with no small pleasure, knowing that future students will now have a reliable guide to the Tantri reliefs.

Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities

Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities

Monsters, tricksters, and sacred cows: animal tales and American identities

The 1992 Quincentennial of the encounter between the New World and the Old resulted in a veritable culture war - an extreme polarization of hardened ideological positions on different ideas of America. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows brings a fresh perspective to the confusing question of American identity. It clears the minefields laid by the generals commanding the opposing camps, while demonstrating that both sides have been primarily interested in protecting and defending an idea of Americanness that cannot resist scrutiny. Some of the leading international scholars in anthropology, comparative literature, and history of the Americas show convincingly in this book that contacts between and among peoples and ethnic groups have, since early colonial times, produced new - and typically American - cultural forms throughout the hemisphere. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows will appeal to the general reader and will attract a wide readership in folklore and cultural anthropology as well as in Caribbean and Latin American studies, comparative literature, and history.

Type- and Motif-Indices 1980-1995: An Inventory

The present article considers current trends in the documentation of narratives. Approximately seventy indices published during the last fifteen years are compared for contents and structure and are evaluated within the framework of the existing national and international systems of classification. Three basic tendencies were observed : 1) a renewed interest in the documentation of narratives in Europe and beyond ; 2) the inclusion of genres that up to now have received less scholarly attention (e.g., animal tales, nursery rhymes, ballads), and of specific forms within individual genres (e.g., comtemporary legends) ; 3) an increasing specialization (systematics, periods) in the indices despite the retention of the international systems of Aarne and Thompson's the Types of the Folktale and Thompson's Motif index.

Kalila wa Dimna, An Allegory of the Mongol Court: The Istanbul University Album

The "Kalila wa Dimna" animal tales, which became known in the West as "The Fables of La Fontaine", can be traced to 4th century India. The tales teach diplomacy and statecraft through the dialogue of animal characters, including two Machievellian jackals. In the 14th century Mongol court of Persia, these tales inspired one of the most remarkable works of Persian art, a narrative cycle of paintings now in the collection of the Istanbul University Library. This volume contains a new translation of the tales and a study of 50 paintings from the original manuscript. It explores the ways in which the artists enriched and expanded the content of the fables to create a wicked and allegorical portrait of the Mongol court.

Mere Creatures: A Study of Modern Fantasy Tales for Children by Elliott Gose

Elliott Gose, Mere Creatures: A Study of Modern Fantasy Tales for Children (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 202. $13.95 The animal story has often served as an argument in favour of following Nature, yet the validity of Nature as a model was questioned by J. S. Mill a long time ago when he argued that man’s duty was to improve Nature, not to follow it. Despite Mill’s essay, writers and critics of children’s literature con­ tinue to see a “natural” link between children and animals, and often place “truths” about human nature in the “other” world of the animal. That children identify with and are attracted to animals is taken for granted by Elliott Gose; that children also recognize and are comforted by the dif­ ference between themselves and animals he also acknowledges. How many children really cry when Bambi’s mother is shot? In Charlotte’s Web, a spider, not a child, dies. The very difference makes the subject of death accessible. Even when restricting ourselves to the human, we initially reassure our chil­ dren that only the very old, not the young, die. But the difference between humans and mere creatures makes Gose’s subject — the use of fantasy to help us arrive at psychic truths — more troublesome than his argument suggests. Perhaps by using this form, we also avoid psychic truths. From Aesop’s Fables to Watership Down, the animal tale has certainly served to confirm man’s view of himself, but children are not male only, and what are the psychic truths for female readers of Watership Down? Gose may well begin by accounting for the appeal of animal existence as “lower and thus less than human but. . . also simply other and thus potentially more than human,” but a study that cites Bruno Bettelheim and has an appendix based on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces proves to be oblivious to the female reader’s experi­ ence. The only heroine examined is Dorothy of the Oz books and, not sur­ prisingly, we soon read that she does not fit Gose’s thesis as snugly as the male protagonists. Even the phrasing, “other . . . more than human,” is ominously like Victorian vocabulary for viewing women. Gose is interested in how readers and characters achieve “a sense of the self.” The term comes from D. W. Winnicott whose theories of play are dis­ cussed and placed in the context of C. J. Jung’s individuation process and Bettelheim’s concept of integration. In addition to his concern with depth psychology, Gose is keenly aware of how fairy tale patterns are frequently utilized in these tales. The author of The World of the Irish Wonder Tale, Gose is very sensitive to the reappearing patterns and to the prominence of the trickster figure. It is these three subjects — depth psychology, fairy tale pat­ terns, and the trickster — that unite his examination of ten texts, but the unity and coherence of his text (old-fashioned terms, but ones he seems to believe in) are threatened when he states his aim: “I will be adapting some general­ ized findings of depth psychology, applied to fairy-tale and myth, to provide 352 insight into the literary qualities of the books: their use of language, charac­ terization, theme, and plot structure.” Who is the intended reader of Mere Creatures, a student of children’s literature or a reader totally unaware of psychological vocabulary and children’s books? The excessive summary and repetition, both of plot and theory, implies a reader ignorant of both psychol­ ogy and children’s literature. The ten works discussed, Just So Stories, Winniethe -Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, The Jungle Book, The Wizard of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Mouse and His Child, Watership Down, and The Hobbit, with the possible exception of Ozma of Oz and The Mouse and His Child, are all familiar to Canadian students of children’s literature. In his Acknowledgments Gose gives credit to his own students of children’s litera­ ture, and while a concern with literary qualities might well be the object of a course, would such students require so much plot...