兒童文學 Week 12

fable：Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized (given human qualities, such as the ability to speak human language) and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as 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 or other powers of humankind.

Aesop's Fables：Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media.

Robert Louis Stevenson ： was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and A Child's Garden of Verses.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks as the 26th most translated author in the world. His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Cesare Pavese, Emilio Salgari, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins".

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde：a novella by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson first published in 1886. The work is commonly known today as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or simply Jekyll & Hyde. It is about a London lawyer named Gabriel John Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde. The novella's impact is such that it has become a part of the language, with the very phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" coming to mean a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.

Treasure Island：an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "buccaneers and buried gold". It was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881 through 1882 under the title Treasure Island, or the mutiny of the Hispaniola, credited to the pseudonym "Captain George North". It was first published as a book on 14 November 1883 by Cassell & Co.

Treasure Island is traditionally considered a coming-of-age story, and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action. It is also noted as a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality—as seen in Long John Silver—unusual for children's literature. It is one of the most frequently dramatized of all novels. Its influence is enormous on popular perceptions of pirates, including such elements as treasure maps marked with an "X", schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen bearing parrots on their shoulders.

New Testament and Aesop's Fables are writing in Greek.

Memento mori： Memento mori("remember that you have to die")is a Latin expression, originating from a practice common in Ancient Rome; as a general came back victorious from a battle, and during his parade ("Triumph") received compliments and honors from the crowd of citizens, he ran the risk of falling victim to haughtiness and delusions of grandeur; to avoid it, a slave stationed behind him would say "Respice post te. Hominem te memento" ( "Look after you [to the time after your death] and remember you're [only] a man."). It was then reused during the medieval period, it is also related to the ars moriendi ("The Art of Dying") and related literature. Memento mori has been an important part of ascetic disciplines as a means of perfecting the character by cultivating detachment and other virtues, and by turning the attention towards the immortality of the soul and the afterlife.

John Denver----Today

Tragedy under Racial Discrimination-----The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye：The Bluest Eye was written by Toni Morrison in 1970. A single mother of two sons, Morrison wrote the novel while she was teaching at Howard University . She centers the story around a young African American girl named Pecola who grows up during the years following the Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio. Due to her dark skin color, Pecola gets taunted for her appearance as the members of her community associate beauty with "whiteness". She ultimately develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for blue eyes. The point of view switches between the perspective of Claudia MacTeer, the daughter of Pecola's foster parents, and multiple third-person limited viewpoints. Due to the controversial issues the book raises such as racism, incest, and child molestation, there have been numerous attempts to ban it from schools and libraries.

Bildungsroman：In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman ( "novel of formation, education, culture"),novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story (though it may also be known as a subset of the coming-of-age story) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is extremely important.

Gothic fiction：Gothic fiction, which is largely known by the subgenre of Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction and horror, death, and at times romance. Its origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled (in its second edition) "A Gothic Story." The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. It originated in England in the second half of the 18th century and had much success in the 19th, as witnessed by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Another well known novel in this genre, dating from the late Victorian era, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The name Gothic refers to the (pseudo)-medieval buildings, emulating Gothic architecture, in which many of these stories take place. This extreme form of romanticism was very popular in England and Germany. The English Gothic novel also led to new novel types such as the German Schauerroman and the French Georgia.

Frankenstein：Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley that tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a grotesque but sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition of the novel was published anonymously in London in 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared on the second edition, published in France in 1823.

Dracula： an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula.
The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel, and invasion literature. Stoker did not invent the vampire but he defined its modern form, and the novel has spawned numerous theatrical, film, and television interpretations.

To Kill a Mockingbird：a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and characters are loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.(One-book-success)

all men are created equal = 人生而平等

 mumble 咀嚼聲
bitter： Having or being a taste that is sharp, acrid, and unpleasant.
prickly：Having prickles.

metaphor：One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol

mor-：death
ex：mortuary park墓園、mortal

ad-：move forward
ex：advanced、adventure

high-profile：An intentionally conspicuous, well-publicized presence or stance

motifs：a. A recurrent thematic element in an artistic or literary work.
              b. A dominant theme or central idea.

competence：能力

tabloid：A newspaper of small format giving the news in condensed form, usually with illustrated, often sensational material.