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Jean de La Fontaine Biography

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About 37 pages (10,968 words)
Jean de La Fontaine Summary

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Name: Jean de La Fontaine
Birth Date: July 8, 1621
Death Date: April 13, 1695
Nationality: French
Gender: Male
Occupations: poet

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Jean de La Fontaine

Jean de La Fontaine is best known for his Fables choisies, mises en vers (Selected Fables, Put into Verse), published in twelve books from 1668 to 1693. Comprising more than two hundred short poems divided more or less evenly among the books, the collection employs mostly encounters between speaking animals in order to illustrate moral dilemmas. Often a moralité (moral) is placed at the beginning or the end summing up the lesson to be learned from the narrative. By taking an age-old genre relying on a simple and moralistic format and putting it into a more sophisticated poetic idiom, La Fontaine quickly achieved for his fables the distinction of being the most popular of all French poetry, read with pleasure by children and adults alike all over the world. From the late seventeenth century on, La Fontaine's fables became an integral part of French pedagogy. French schoolchildren learned individual fables by heart in their literature classes and the practice continues still today.

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    Mark A. Cohen, Bard College. Jean de La Fontaine from Dictionary of Literary Biography. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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