Aesop Redivivus
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Authors
Boyle, Mary
Issue Date
1890
Volume
Issue
Type
Book, Whole
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Abstract
This is a strange book. It is beautifully covered in half-leather with leather corners. With woodcuts derived from Kirkall, it looks at first like a serious old fable book. The couplet after the title-page gives a clue that not all is in earnest here: Old cuts are here wedded to Fables new./But I'd skip the Morals if I were you. Once one starts reading, one discovers that it is a book mostly of fable-parodies, written surprisingly by a woman. The first fable encourages repeatedly asking a woman to marry until she gets sick of hearing the request and says yes. The second has a distraught husband saved by a beating administered to his wife by a stranger she has mistaken for her husband! Many of the fables seem to build from the illustration, like Crossed (74) which uses the old fable illustration of the trumpeter taken prisoner now for a quite different story. Sometimes the new fable is very well done. Thus The Duel (50) is an excellent development of the Aesopic fable. At the key moment, the dueling frog and mouse both turn on the approaching hawk and stab him! Similarly good is the parody of the story of two cocks fighting over a hen (39). Here she rejects the winner, saying that she does not want to mate with a prize fighter. Another good transformation is The Pseudo Mariner (126). Perhaps the illustration on 78 was used to show the dying man pointing to the treasure in the field. Now it introduces a sardonic turnabout: the fawning nephew who always praised his uncle's bad poetry receives his poetry books, whereas his honest nephew gets his money! Some of these fables end up seeming highly simplistic to me. The stag admiring himself in the water misses supper (18), and his fellows know why he has missed. All in all, this is a surprising little book. Like the work of George Ade, Boyle apparently uses capital letters to emphasize words. The T of C and 1-2 separated from the binding as I read this book. On 9, the author probably wants one of the two responses to come from the ink and not both from the pen. On 133 the editor mixes up the quotation marks.
Description
Citation
Publisher
London: Field & Tuer; The Leadenhall Press; Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co/NY: Scribner & Welford
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PubMed ID
DOI
Identifier
4316 (Access ID)