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The Young Widow
The Young Widow is a fable of Italian origin, made famous by being included in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.21). Originally a cynical attack on female inconstancy, later treatments were more thoughtful. The Fable The fable originally appeared in Laurentius Abstemius' collection of humorous fables, the ''Hecatomythium'' (1492). Soon afterwards a close translation appeared in the English jest book Merry Tales and Quick Answers (c.1530), but in general the trend among later fabulists has been to embroider upon the rather threadbare narration of Abstemius. La Fontaine softens the sarcasm by making the change of attitude less immediate in his treatment of the story while Charles Denis in his 1754 translation of La Fontaine lengthens the period further and explains the change as simply the effect of time. La Fontaine's delicately ironical interpretation of the fable is reflected in later artistic treatments, such as Lambron Des Piltières' odd mixture of the Classical and the contemp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Young Widow
The Young Widow is a fable of Italian origin, made famous by being included in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.21). Originally a cynical attack on female inconstancy, later treatments were more thoughtful. The Fable The fable originally appeared in Laurentius Abstemius' collection of humorous fables, the ''Hecatomythium'' (1492). Soon afterwards a close translation appeared in the English jest book Merry Tales and Quick Answers (c.1530), but in general the trend among later fabulists has been to embroider upon the rather threadbare narration of Abstemius. La Fontaine softens the sarcasm by making the change of attitude less immediate in his treatment of the story while Charles Denis in his 1754 translation of La Fontaine lengthens the period further and explains the change as simply the effect of time. La Fontaine's delicately ironical interpretation of the fable is reflected in later artistic treatments, such as Lambron Des Piltières' odd mixture of the Classical and the contemp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Fontaine's Fables
Jean de La Fontaine collected fables from a wide variety of sources, both Western and Eastern, and adapted them into French free verse. They were issued under the general title of Fables in several volumes from 1668 to 1694 and are considered classics of French literature. Humorous, nuanced and ironical, they were originally aimed at adults but then entered the educational system and were required learning for school children. Composition history Divided into 12 books, there are 239 of the ''Fables'', varying in length from a few lines to some hundred, those written later being as a rule longer than those written earlier. The first collection of ''Fables Choisies'' had appeared March 31, 1668, dividing 124 fables into six books over its two volumes. They were dedicated to ''"Monseigneur"'' Louis, ''le Grand Dauphin'', the six-year-old son of Louis XIV of France and his queen consort Maria Theresa of Spain. By this time, La Fontaine was 47 and known to readers chiefly as the aut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laurentius Abstemius
Laurentius Abstemius (c. 1440–1508) was an Italian writer and professor of philology, born at Macerata in Ancona. His learned name plays on his family name of Bevilaqua (Drinkwater), and he was also known by the Italian name Lorenzo Astemio. A Neo-Latin writer of considerable talents at the time of the Humanist revival of letters, his first published works appeared in the 1470s and were distinguished by minute scholarship. During that decade he moved to Urbino and became ducal librarian, although he was to move between there and other parts of Italy thereafter as a teacher. The work for which he is principally remembered now is ''Hecatomythium'' (1495), a collection of a hundred fables written in Latin and largely of his own invention. However, the inclusion together with this work of the thirty-three Aesopic fables translated from the Greek by Lorenzo Valla gave the impression that his own work was of the same kind. Several of the fables of Abstemius, it is true, relate to Ae ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shakespeare's Jest Book
The title of Shakespeare's Jest Book has been given to two quite different early Tudor period collections of humorous anecdotes, published within a few years of each other. The first was ''The Hundred Merry Tales'', the only surviving complete edition of which was published in 1526. The other, published about 1530, was titled ''Merry Tales and Quick Answers'' and originally contained 113 stories. An augmented edition of 1564 contained 140. The explanation of the title comes from a reference to one or other collection in William Shakespeare's play ''Much Ado About Nothing'' in which the character Beatrice has been accused 'that I had my good wit out of the 100 Merry Tales' (II.sc.1). By that time it seems that the two works were being confounded with each other. Contents The stories in the 1526 ''Hundred Merry Tales'' are largely set in England, mostly in London or the surrounding area, and contain the stock figures of stupid clergymen, unfaithful wives, and Welshmen, the butt of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 – ) was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book ''The Devil's Dictionary'' was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature", and his book '' Tales of Soldiers and Civilians'' (also published as ''In the Midst of Life'') was named by the Grolier Club as one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900. A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. S. T. Joshi speculates that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall; russian: link=no, Марк Заха́рович Шага́л ; be, Марк Захаравіч Шагал . (born Moishe Shagal; 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. An early modernism, modernist, he was associated with several major art movement, artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Born in the Russian Empire, today Belarus, he was of Russian Jews, Jewish origin. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern Europe and Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art, Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1923 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isabelle Aboulker
Isabelle Aboulker (born 23 October 1938) is a French composer, particularly known for her operas and other vocal works. In 1999, she gained a prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts and in 2000 the music prize of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques for her numerous lyric pieces. Life and work Isabelle Aboulker was born in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. Her father was the Algerian-born film director and writer Marcel Aboulker and her maternal grandfather was the composer Henry Février. While following a course in composition and keyboard studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, she started composing for the theatre, the cinema and television. She then worked for the Conservatoire as their chief accompanist and voice teacher and authored several educational works. In 1980, she turned to composing operas and subsequently many other vocal works. Because of her work with children, Isabelle Aboulker made a particular specia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fables By Laurentius Abstemius
Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying. A fable differs from a parable in that the latter ''excludes'' animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech or other powers of humankind. Conversely, an animal tale specifically includes talking animals as characters. Usage has not always been so clearly distinguished. In the King James Version of the New Testament, "" ("''mythos''") was rendered by the translators as "fable" in the First Epistle to Timothy, the Second Epistle to Timothy, the Epistle to Titus and the First Epistle of Peter. A person who writes fables is a fabulist. History The fable is one of the most enduring forms of folk literature, sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
