Wandering Fables and Conversing Beasts from India to Phyrgia

Fables are peripatetic travelers. Marked by ambivalent authorship, contested origins, and presenting universal themes and many-sided protagonists, itinerant fables often illustrate otherwise unattested connectedness across cultural borders. As imaginal works with implicit or explicit ethical and political undertones, fables appeal to a variety of audiences across different times and places. And as borrowed ware in those instances where a clear trajectory of traversing linguistic and cultural divide is discernible, fables exemplify the fraught process of acculturation, refashioning their manner and matter to meet new expectations. The essays collected in Wandering Fables and Conversing Beasts from India to Phrygia range in subject matter from animal stories to their authors, narrators, and their subsequent commentators, as well as reception histories and conceptual genealogies. As a collection they foreground the merits of a comparatist lens, from both emic and etic perspectives.