Fabelbruk I svensk tidigmodernitet: en genrehistorisk studie
No Thumbnail Available
Authors
Zillén, Erik
Issue Date
2020
Volume
Issue
Type
Language
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
"Usage of Fable in Swedish Early Modernity: A Genre History." Erik was good enough to send me this copy from his Lunds University. What a mammoth and serious scholarly work! My first recommendation to a non-Swedish reader is to go straight to the "Summary" section for English, German, or French (585-99). These foreign-language summaries track the work very nicely as it examines the usage of fable between 1500 and 1800. Zillén describes the movement in general as from a "Lutheran humanist culture, via a mainly French-influenced aesthetical as well as pragmatical reorientation of the usage of fable during the Enlightenment, to a crisis that hit the fable around 1800, caused by the paradigmatic shifts of modernity, wherein a new literary understanding led to the questioning of the very idea of literature usage" (585). The study pursues the "newly coined concept of the usage arena." Three principles have governed the usage of fable: a chrestomathy principle, a vehicle principle, and an analogy principle." Chrestomathy, I learned here, is the usage of select passages useful (Greek chrestos) for learning a language, specifically in this case Latin and Greek. The fable was also used then in the vernacular for moral edification. One example in this era and usage, I was curious to learn, was a Swedish selection of L'Estrange's 1692 version, with the Catholic reflections removed and Luther's foreword of 1530 substituted for L'Estrange's preface! This usage is capable of "turning the fables into carriers of widely differing views and ideologies." The third great usage has fables being the source and analogue of exempla stories. This usage allows the fable to penetrate into different cultural contexts. This monograph goes on then to examine the figure of Aesop. A further chapter examines the modernizing of fable as a genre in the seventeenth century through La Fontaine and LaMotte and in the eighteenth through Gay, Gellert, and Lessing. Fables in the late eighteenth century found their way heavily into newspapers, and were also used to create a popular first book for aspiring writers. Zillén sees four causes for the seeming "used-upness" of fable in modernity's undermining of "the virtue ethical way of thinking, exemplum-based rhetoric, the anthropomorphizing view of the animal world, and the poetological principle combining business with pleasure." He finds the genre alive in language teaching within schools; in quotations, allusions, and parodies; and in literature for children. It was a delight to track this study, if only in its English summary!
Description
Citation
Publisher
Makadam Förlag
License
Journal
Volume
Issue
PubMed ID
DOI
Identifier
12556 (Access ID)