Unlike his friend John Gay, Swift never wrote a collection of fables. Instead, fables and the fabulous are often found buried within other genres and kinds of writing: in the scuffling spider and bee of The Battel of the Books, for instance, and in his satiric verses and in tongue-in-cheek curiosities like A Meditation upon a Broom-Stick. This chapter begins with a section on the circulation and perception of fables during Swift’s lifetime, before turning to Swift’s distortions of this genre. The final part of the chapter zooms in on Gulliver’s Travels and finds a version of Aesop in the repulsive Yahoos of Part Four.

Chapter 5 explores Faulkner’s lifelong interest in the physicality of writing and the relationship of this interest to questions about religion and literature. With his 1954 novel A Fable, he foregrounds a play of text and materiality that had been present in his work since his early handmade books. Faulkner persuaded Random House to issue A Fable with no title on the hardbound cover beneath the dust jacket but rather iterations of the cross, a motif they used throughout the book, but which has disappeared from current editions of the novel. Faulkner dedicated the book to his daughter Jill on her twenty-first birthday, which he later maintained was a way of saying that she was now on her own. The book itself, though, which interweaves aspects of the Gospels with a First World War narrative, becomes its own quasi-sacred physical support for readers, a new kind of Bible as material text. Multiple characters in the novel try to find versions of sustenance in physical texts, but many come away disappointed. Finally, the chapter examines Faulkner’s ambiguous use of the term literature, which generally took on a more positive sense for him when connected with the materials of writing.

Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) combines the reforming strategies of satire, conduct writing, and fable. The collision of these forms creates a fabular hybrid, a text in which fabular elements are folded into the generic markers of the conduct book, resulting in an intensification of the satire of conduct writing and infusing it with a moral claim. In the preface to her excoriating exposure of the abuses of power in domestic life, Collier applauds Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants for its “ingenuity,” the descriptor she applies to her own manual, and the text bears comparison to the Scriblerian project with its satire of both medium and message. The three sections into which Ingeniously Tormenting is divided emphasize the satire of the conduct book. The concluding fable of the Lion, the Leopard, the Lynx, and the Lamb, however, forces a rereading of Ingeniously Tormenting and points to John Gay’s fables. When references to animals, teeth, and claws to describe human behavior are echoed in the real teeth and claws of the animals in the fable, the essay’s tone darkens. The fable’s placement at the end of the book reflects the ironic inversion characteristic of satire.

In her poetry, Anne Finch employs fable to simultaneously distance herself from abusive satire, which she associates with lampoon, and produce reformative satire, or satire that addresses the shortcomings of society more generally in an effort to bring about the improvement of the culture-at-large. In spite of her purported aversion to lampoonery, however, Finch represents within several of her verse fables figurative satirists who abuse their targets without seeking to reform them. She does so not with a censorious tone designed to encourage readers’ disapproval but in a manner that emphasizes the figurative satirists’ pleasure, pleasure that emerges largely from reversals of power. Finch not only invites the reader to participate in this pleasure but appears to do so herself. As a writer of satirical fables, Finch engages critically with questions regarding what satire should be. At the same time, a number of her fables suggest her desire to engage in satire as she wishes it could be: an empowering personal attack with no repercussions.

The political violence of Reconstruction, especially as directed at African Americans, initially occasioned national alarm and federal intervention.As Reconstruction progressed, however, literary tactics emerged that rendered acts of terror as discrete and disorganized, and thus as posing no threat to the nation state. Eventually dominating the domain of genteel print, literary and journalistic narratives adopted a number of strategies that rendered racial violence routine and even normative, portraying white southerners as besieged victims of the Reconstruction government forced to resort to violence in order to protect Anglo-Saxon prerogatives.Although the rhetoric of the “bloody shirt,” along with literary interventions by Mark Twain and Albion Tourgée, sought to foreground the continued threat of racial violence to the nation state and its citizens, this ascendant narrative increasingly controlled the “facts” of Reconstruction.By the early twentieth century, historians and novelists had consolidated the lessons of Reconstruction in ways conducive to an expansionist white nationalism.

This chapter is concerned with the fable, in this case the Akkadian fable of The Date-Palm and the Tamarisk, which travelled eastward to Persia and westward to Greece: in both places, the fable retained its ‘deep structure’ but underwent adaptations on the surface to suit the new localities. The fable posed a fundamental question to its audiences – is the cult of the gods more important than preservation of humans? – and provided a platform on which views and beliefs of other cultures could be built, with the change of scene or characters as needed.

This chapter investigates the links between the Akkadian poem Etana, the fragmentary Lykambes epode of the archaic Greek poet Archilochus, and the Aesopic fable of The Eagle and the Fox, carefully assessing both similarities and differences in these sources as well as in further, related Greek material, and also considering the possibility of further versions of Etana in India, Egypt and the folklore of the Baltic region. Taken together, these reflections lead to a distinction, in particular, between a floating motif model and a fixed text model of transmission, both of which may be discernible in the various manifestations of Etana in Greece and beyond.

This chapter surveys Atwood’s three short fiction collections published since 2000 – The Tent, Moral Disorder, and Stone Mattress: Nine Tales – and is a sequel to the chapter “Margaret Atwood’s Short Stories and Shorter Fictions” presented in the original Companion. Arranged in three parts, one on each collection with detailed analyses of examples, the chapter explores generic questions raised in these highly varied collections of short fiction, together with Atwood’s thematic and stylistic range. The Tent features a dazzling mix of prose subgenres: fables, dialogues, essay-fictions, rewritings of myth, and prose poetry, which are analyzed in “No More Photos” and “Our Cat Enters Heaven,” while Moral Disorder, Atwood’s first short story cycle, shows how her storytelling comes closest to the short story proper. Stone Mattress introduces a new variant with its “tales,” moving beyond the boundaries of social realism into genre fiction as Atwood plays with those conventions, combining a strong interest in plot with social and ethical critique.

Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a version of the well-known tale of the cock and the fox, has been read as a Menippean parody of a spectrum of authors: various forms and kinds of knowledge, from proverbs to dream theory to poetics to anti-Pelagian theology, proffer a myriad of ways in which to read the world without cohering in the slightest with one another, or solving the immediate, practical problem faced by the cock and his hens: the threat of death at the hands of a creature that they have not yet directly encountered. This chapter suggests how modern readers of the tale might negotiate its formidable critical legacy and find their way to a fresh, unique encounter with a tale in which direct experience promises a means of liberation from the plethora of discourses in which narration is always in danger of becoming mired. In pursuing experience rather than authority, the chapter argues, we are following a trail that begins within the tale itself.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Animals are to be found in many places and modes in Chaucer’s work. They feature as similes (Palamon and Arcite in the Knight’s Tale are compared to lion, tiger and boar), star in fables (the Nun’s Priest’s Tale) or are simply themselves, like the cow of the lyric Truth, or the spider of the Treatise on the Astrolable. Heeding Lisa Kiser’s caution that animals in literature risk being absorbed into the human mindset, this essay explores some of the animals (and insects) found in Chaucer, and, by reading them alongside Isidore of Seville’s definition of ‘beast’, seeks to demonstrate how they resist such absorption and instead steer our attention to aspects of daily life or concepts we are liable to overlook. Animals may act as vehicles for our thoughts, but sometimes they carry us to places we did not consciously intend.