In the following essay, Gross asserts that the narrative remarks which frame La Fontaine's story Psyché are meant to draw the reader's attention to the powerful effects of both nature and art on human emotion.

In the following essay, Slater identifies some organizing principles that seem to govern the grouping of La Fontaine's poetic fables within each of his books, nevertheless concluding that this organization does not serve to underscore any calculated theme or intention.

In the following essay, Danner summarizes the evaluations of such La Fontaine scholars as de Mourgues, Runte, and Rubin regarding La Fontaine's use of irony in his Fables. Danner suggests that disagreements between the critical assessments are the result of differing—and not always precise—definitions of irony.

In the following essay, Wine suggests that in Psyché, La Fontaine explored the limits of classical theories of perfect beauty and experimented with new forms of esthetics and style in his own writing.

In the essay that follows, Sweetser argues that La Fontaine used metaphors of travel in several of his Fables to reflect on the direction of his own life and to counsel the future king of France on the need for and direction of social reforms.

In the following essay, Moravcevich asserts that La Fontaine uses the seventeenth-century tools of reason and rhetoric in a complex but classically. pleasing manner via his animal characters and ultimately in order to instruct his readers in "wisdom rather than morality."

In the following essay, Grise contends that when one character dupes another in La Fontaine's Contes or Tales, the reader participates in a pleasurable sense of superiority for being in on the deceitful jokes.

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.

In the following essay, Cauley argues that La Fontaine uses his Contes or Tales to examine narrative itself, relying as he does upon such techniques as narrators within the narrative, "authorial interventions," and interruptions by those who are listening to the tale within the tale.

In the following essay Rubin asserts that, contrary to the arguments of other critics, La Fontaine did not ignore the prevailing poetic styles and concerns of the time, but that in fact his Fables reveal his interest in the baroque style current at the time as well as the influence of contemporary writers such as the satirist Boileau.

In the following excerpt, Runte observes that in the century after La Fontaine's death, fabulists and other writers tended to characterize his work in the fable genre his work as immoral and as imprecise in style.

In the following essay, Guiton commends the appealing, poetic language of La Fontaine's fables.

In the following essay, Rubin clarifies the definition of the term 'fable" and asserts that La Fontaine employs the fable genre not in its traditional rhetorical or instructional format—not to persuade or please—but as a means to provoke thought in its readers In footnote1, Rubin writes: "This article is a slightly revised and expanded version of a paper presented before the 17th-century French Literature Division of the Modern Language Association of America o...