The Fables chosen, put in worms by Mr. of the Fountain (or more simply the Fables ) is a work of Jean of the Fountain written between 1668 and 1694. It acts as its name indicates it of a collection of Fable S written in worms, the majority putting in scene anthropomorphic animals and containing a Morale with the beginning or the end. These fables were written with an educational aim and were addressed to the Dauphin.

List fables

See also: List of the fables of Jean of the Fountain alphabetically

Range of work

The Fables constitute one of the poetic collections most known of the Classicisme. Holy-Beuve could say that Jean of the Fountain was the Homère of the French: Thus, the feat of ingenuity of the Fountain is to give by its work a high value to a kind which until there did not have any literary dignity and was reserved for the school exercises of rhetoric and Latin. The Fountain carries out besides often a rise in the " bas" kind; , that of the fable, by integrating in its accounts the average style (pastoral) and the high style (epopee). The fable epistle of the book second is a perfect example of cohabitation of the three styles. Work of récriture of the fables of Ésope, Phèdre, Abstémius, but also of texts of Horace ( the Rat of the cities and the rat of the fields ), of Tite-Live (" members and the estomac"), of letters apocryphal books of Hippocrates (" Démocrite and Abdéritains"), and of good of others still, they constitute a sum of the Latin and Greek traditional culture, and open even in the second collection with the Indian tradition with the choice of fables of the Panchatantra. Work all at the same time poetry and thought: because the Fables offer a meditation in act on the nature and the effects of the word, especially political, and of their own stating: Louis Marin thus showed the subtlety of the reflection like device of these apparently innocent fables, starting from the paradigmatic example of the fable entitled the Capacity of the Fables (see Bibliographie).

Illustration of the Fables

The fables are illustrated as of the first edition by Chauveau and its disciples: it is that the fable is a kind close to the emblem, and for this reason functions like a moral image; it thus accommodates readily its iconographic redoubling at didactic ends. At the 18th century, Oudry proposes new illustrations, plus naturalists. Grandville in 1838, then Gustave Doré in 1867 propose successively a new iconography. At the 20th century, Benjamin Rabier followed Chagall proposes in their turn their visions Fables .

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