Aesop's pen: Adaptation, authorship, and satire in the Aesopic tradition.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Lefkowitz, Jeremy B.

Contributor:

Rosen, Ralph Mark, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Classical literature.

0294.

Penn dissertations--Classical studies.

Classical studies--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Classical studies.

Classical studies--Penn dissertations.

0294.

Physical Description:

206 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 70-06A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Aesop is a peculiar authorial figure: Although no birthplace, fable, event, or anecdote can be securely attached to him, and although nothing can be said to have been written by him, many authors have composed fables and labeled them "Aesop's." This thesis investigates fables and anecdotes ascribed to Aesop during the period before our earliest surviving collections of "Aesop's fables." Too often, ancient authors have been seen as simply quoting from a fixed a collection of fables; but in fact we have no access to any such collection before the second-century C.E. Thus, in the case of authors such as Aristophanes, Callimachus, and Phaedrus, all of whom ascribe fables to Aesop, we encounter a fable tradition in which the "retellings" predate the putatively "original versions" by many centuries. This thesis develops a new perspective on the Aesopic fables and anecdotes found throughout ancient poetry by turning away from the notion of "original versions" and instead asking how any given adaptation engages with other representations of fable-telling and considering what the figure of Aesop may have stood for as a cultural hero and literary model. The Introduction treats briefly the main approaches scholars have taken in the past to the Aesopic fable, and stresses the importance of developing an approach that does not depend on "fidelity criticism," i.e. evaluations of adaptations based on similarities and differences in comparison with putatively "original" versions. Aristophanes (Chapter Two), Callimachus (Chapter Three), and Phaedrus (Chapter Four) have different modes of alluding to Aesopica, but each author approaches the tradition with an awareness that new fables can be invented in the "style of Aesop" and that such newly-coined fables can even be ascribed to Aesop. Cumulatively, these chapters demonstrate that representations of fable-telling in ancient poetry are not merely quotations (or misquotations) of fixed collections. Rather, analysis of the expectations, intentions, and of the various conventional features of the situations in which fables are told allows us to describe a kind of poetics of Aesopic fable-telling that provides a more complete picture of the use of fables in ancient poetry than source-criticism alone.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Classical Studies) -- University of Pennsylvania, 2009.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: 2024.

Adviser: Ralph M. Rosen.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9781109232257

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.