Jean de la fontaine died
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Jean La Fontaine
British anthropologist (born 1931)
This article is about the anthropologist. For the 17th-century French writer, see Jean de La Fontaine.
Jean Sybil La FontaineFRAI (born 1 November 1931) is a British anthropologist and emeritus professor of the London School of Economics.[1] She has done research in Africa and the UK, on topics including ritual, gender, child abuse,[2]witchcraft and satanism. In 1994 she wrote a government report: The Extent and Nature of Organised and Ritual Abuse.[3]
Early life
La Fontaine was born in Nairobi, Kenya, on 1 November 1931 and educated at The Kenya High School, Nairobi. She then studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, gaining a B.A. in archaeology and anthropology in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1957.[4]
Career
After teaching at King's College, Newcastle (1961, part-time), Lovanium University, Zaire (1962–1963) and Birkbeck College (1965–1968), La Fontaine was appointed Reader in Anthropology at the London School of Economics in 1968 and Professor of Anthropology there in
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Jean de La Fontaine (July 8, 1621 – April 13, 1695) was the most famous French fabulist and probably the most widely read French poet of the seventeenth century. According to Gustave Flaubert, he was the only French poet to understand and master the texture of the French language before Hugo. La Fontaine's fables are choice in every sense: utterly correct, balanced, exquisite in rhyme, natural and easy, droll, witty, knowing, sage, utterly French. They were an immediate success. Many generations of French students have learned them by heart at school, and can quote the most famous lines which have become part of the common language. A set of postage stamps celebrating La Fontaine and the fables was issued by France in 1995.
Biography
Early years
La Fontaine was born at Château-Thierry in Champagne, France. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, maitre des eaux et forts—a kind of deputy-ranger&madsh;of the duchy of Chateau-Thierry; his mother was Francoise Pidoux. On both sides his family was of the highest provincial middle class, but was not noble; his father was
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French poet, whose Fables rank among the masterpieces of world literature, but on his death bed Jean de La Fontaine regretted ever having written his tales. In his own time La Fontaine was considered a vagabond, dreamer, and lover of pleasure. A rustic character, he never was a real courtier and drifted happily from one patron to another. Because of the universal nature of his fables, La Fontaine's poems about industrious ants, brave lions, and carefree grasshoppers are still widely read. The first collection of the Fables La Fontaine dedicated to the Dauphin, the grandson of Louis XIV, for his instruction.
A grasshopper gay
Sang the summer away,
And found herself poor
By the winter's first roar.
Of meat or of bread,
Not a morsel she had!
(from The Fables of La Fontaine, translated from the French by Elizur Wright, Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853, p. 1)
Jean de La Fontaine was born in Ch�teau-Thierry, Champagne, in central France. Little is known of his early childhood. Fran�oise Pidoux, his mother, came from a respected middleclass family from Poitie
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