SOURCE: "La Fontaine's Theories on the Fable as a Literary Form," in Rice University Studies, Vol. 57, No. 2, Spring 1971, pp. 115-27.

In the following essay, Wadsworth examines La Fontaine's contributions to the development of the fable genre and traces the fable's literary antecedents. He concludes that the genre's lack of respectability imparted creative freedom to the fabulist.

… je me suis flatté de l'espérance que si je ne courais dans cette carrière avec succès, on me donnerait au moins la gloire de l'avoir ouverte.

—La Fontaine, preface of 1668

The words of La Fontaine display a mixture of winning modesty and well-founded pride. In presenting his first six books of fables to the public in 1668 he had tried his best to please an exacting audience, but of course he could not count upon achieving this goal. At least he could claim that his project had the virtue of...