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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press
By Annabel Patterson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. pp. 177. $29-95 (cloth); 12-95 (paper).
Narrower in scope than her previous two books, Censorship and Interpretation and Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Annabel Patterson's study of Aesopian fable reveals the author's continuing political interest in the popular voice in literature. The premise of the study, that Aesopian writing is an adult subject and fundamentally political, will arouse little dissent. Its more particular claims, which I paraphrase for brevity, are more challenging. Aesopian writing, which begins with the legendary Life of Aesop, implicitly contains, Patterson contends, a set of propositions it cannot fully control-that literature draws attention to unequal power relations, that those without power must encode their commentary, that texts need a name (an author) to cling to if they are to acquire cultural resonance, that (literary) wit can emancipate, and that metaphor in treating basic issues of life returns us to the irreducible animal materiality f being as essential to survival (pp. 11-12).
The first chapter, which treats the originary purposes of Aesopian fable through an examination of the Life, makes felicitous reading, as fabulolis as it is informative. Accompanied by several illustrative plates and engravings on Aesop's career, the chapter is so full of the stuff of life, it made me, feeling something like Caliban, cry to read it all again. The several representations of Aesop's hunched back, his legendary plainness, not to say ugliness, his history as a slave...
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