In his new book, Jack Zipes - acclaimed champion of fairy tales and children's literature- shares his ideas about how to make storytelling work. Combining the insights of a gifted teacher and a natural storyteller's love of the unexpected, Creative Storytelling is a practical book that brims over with pleasures- for the storyteller, teacher, librarian, parent, and anyone else involved in making stories come alive.
Written with love for young storytellers (and older ones, aswell) . Creative storytelling explains how stories can be told with an eye to canons, social standards, and ethical issues, and most importantly with respect for children themselves.
A useful book that I came across during my research exploration. This book is probably not going to help me at all during my project, but it was a great way to gain some knowledge and background research into some relevant information. Eventhough it may not be of any use to me, it is a great way to explore not only relevant topics relating to the project, but to think outside of the box and explore in depth about the other possibilities. It was interesting to read about the stories we used to get told in school, like :
- The Tortoise and the Hare, what was the moral of the story? .... that slow and steady wins the race
- The Boy who Cried Wolf - Moral of the story is, Liars are not always believed even when they tell the truth.
The Wisdom of the Beasts Animal Tales and Fables
The focus in this section is on different kinds of animal tales, with an emphasis on the fable as a distinct genre but one that is related to the fairy tale, as all the short narrative forms such as the legend, myth, and anecdote are related to one another. To create transition, I generally tell the wonderful tale How Six Made Their Way through the World.
Once again there are many different versions of this tale.
The Grimms' story is about a soldier who is discharged from service with three pennies and vows to get revenge on the king if he can find the right people. He travels into the forest and meets and recruits: 1) a strong man carrying a bunch of trees; 2) a sharpshooter who can hit a target two miles away; 3) a man blowing windmills with his breath two miles away; 4) a runner who can run faster than a bird can fly; 5) a man who wears a cap that freezes everything if it is worn straight. These five men help the soldier defeat the king's daughter in a foot race. But the treacherous king and his daughter want to cheat and kill the soldier and his helpers, who are, however, too clever for these deceitful people. In the end, the soldier and his five helpers leave with the king's treasury, which they share with one another, and the soldier does not marry the princess.
Fable
Fable is a literary genre. A fable is a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, mythical creatures, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities such as verbal communication), and that illustrates or leads to an interpretation of a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly in a pithy maxim.
A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech and other powers of humankind.
There are many genres that use animals, the fable has a history that goes back thousands of years, and the most important collection, even today, is Aesop's Fables. It has been said that Aesop was a fleed slave who told his fables in a coded language using animals as symbols to conceal his subversive messages. The fact is, however, that we are not certain who Aesop was and exactly why he told his tales.