In this imaginative and illuminating work, Annabel Patterson traces
the origins and meanings of the Aesopian fable, as well as its
function in Renaissance culture and subsequently. She shows how the
fable worked as a medium of political analysis and communication,
especially from or on behalf of the politically powerless.
Patterson begins with an analysis of the legendary "Life" of Aesop,
its cultural history and philosophical implications, a topic that
involves such widely separated figures as La Fontaine, Hegel, and
Vygotsky. The myth's origin is recovered here in the saving myth of
Aesop the Ethiopian, black, ugly, who began as a slave but become
both free and influential, a source of political wisdom. She then
traces the early modern history of the fable from Caxton, Lydgate,
and Henryson through the eighteenth century, focusing on such
figures as Spenser, Sidney, Lyly, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well
as the lesser-known John Ogilby, Sir Roger L'Estrange, and Samuel
Croxall.
Patterson discusses the famous fable of "The Belly and the
Members," which, because it articulated in symbolic terms some of
the most intransigent problems in political philosophy and
practice, was still going strong as a symbolic text in the
mid-nineteenth century, where it was focused on industrial
relations by Karl Marx and by George Eliot against electoral
reform.
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