Anthropomorphic cat guarding geese, Egypt, ca. 1120 BCE 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, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying. 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. Conversely, an animal tale specifically includes talking animals as characters. Usage has not always been so clearly distinguished. In the King James Version of the New Testament, "μῦθος" (" mythos") was rendered by the translators as "fable" [1] in the First Epistle to Timothy, the Second Epistle to Timothy, the Epistle to Titus and the First Epistle of Peter. [2] A person who writes fables is a fabulist. History Aesopic or Aesop's fable Africa India Europe Modern era Fabulists Classic Modern Notable fable collections See also Further reading Notes References Contents Fable - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable#Modern_era 1 of 11 9/27/2022, 12:11 PM
Transcript
Anthropomorphic cat guarding
geese, Egypt, ca. 1120 BCE
FableFable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose orverse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants,inanimate objects, or forces of nature that areanthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particularmoral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be addedexplicitly as a concise maxim or saying.
A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludesanimals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature asactors that assume speech or other powers of humankind.Conversely, an animal tale specifically includes talking animalsas characters.
Usage has not always been so clearly distinguished. In the KingJames Version of the New Testament, "μῦθος" ("mythos") wasrendered by the translators as "fable"[1] in the First Epistle to Timothy, the Second Epistle toTimothy, the Epistle to Titus and the First Epistle of Peter.[2]
A person who writes fables is a fabulist.
HistoryAesopic or Aesop's fable
Africa
India
Europe
Modern era
Fabulists
Classic
Modern
Notable fable collections
See also
Further reading
Notes
References
Contents
Fable - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable#Modern_era
The fable is one of the most enduring forms of folk literature, spread abroad, modernresearchers agree,[3] less by literary anthologies than by oral transmission. Fables can be foundin the literature of almost every country.
The varying corpus denoted Aesopica or Aesop's Fables includes most of the best-knownwestern fables, which are attributed to the legendary Aesop, supposed to have been a slave inancient Greece around 550 BCE. When Babrius set down fables from the Aesopica in verse for aHellenistic Prince "Alexander," he expressly stated at the head of Book II that this type of"myth" that Aesop had introduced to the "sons of the Hellenes" had been an invention of"Syrians" from the time of "Ninos" (personifying Nineveh to Greeks) and Belos ("ruler").[4]
Epicharmus of Kos and Phormis are reported as having been among the first to invent comicfables.[5] Many familiar fables of Aesop include "The Crow and the Pitcher", "The Tortoise andthe Hare" and "The Lion and the Mouse". In ancient Greek and Roman education, the fable wasthe first of the progymnasmata—training exercises in prose composition and public speaking—wherein students would be asked to learn fables, expand upon them, invent their own, andfinally use them as persuasive examples in longer forensic or deliberative speeches. The need ofinstructors to teach, and students to learn, a wide range of fables as material for theirdeclamations resulted in their being gathered together in collections, like those of Aesop.
African oral culture[6] has a rich story-telling tradition. As they have for thousands of years,people of all ages in Africa continue to interact with nature, including plants, animals andearthly structures such as rivers, plains, and mountains. Grandparents enjoy enormous respectin African societies and fill the new role of story-telling during retirement years. Children and,to some extent, adults are mesmerized by good story-tellers when they become animated intheir quest to tell a good fable.
Joel Chandler Harris wrote African-American fables in the Southern context of slavery underthe name of Uncle Remus. His stories of the animal characters Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and BrerBear are modern examples of African-American story-telling, this though should not transcendcritiques and controversies as to whether or not Uncle Remus was a racist or apologist forslavery. The Disney movie Song of the South introduced many of the stories to the public andothers not familiar with the role that storytelling played in the life of cultures and groupswithout training in speaking, reading, writing, or the cultures to which they had been relocatedto from world practices of capturing Africans and other indigenous populations to provide slavelabor to colonized countries.
India has a rich tradition of fables, many derived from traditional stories and related to local
History
Aesopic or Aesop's fable
Africa
India
Fable - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable#Modern_era
Printed image of the fable of the blacksmith and the dog
from the sixteenth century.[9]
natural elements. Indian fables often teach a particular moral.[7] In some stories the gods haveanimal aspects, while in others the characters are archetypal talking animals similar to thosefound in other cultures. Hundreds of fables were composed in ancient India during the firstmillennium BCE, often as stories within frame stories. Indian fables have a mixed cast ofhumans and animals. The dialogues are often longer than in fables of Aesop and often comicalas the animals try to outwit one another by trickery and deceit. In Indian fables, humanity is notpresented as superior to the animals. Prime examples of the fable in India are the Panchatantraand the Jataka tales. These included Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, the Hitopadesha, Vikramand The Vampire, and Syntipas' Seven Wise Masters, which were collections of fables that werelater influential throughout the Old World. Ben E. Perry (compiler of the "Perry Index" ofAesop's fables) has argued controversially that some of the Buddhist Jataka tales and some ofthe fables in the Panchatantra may have been influenced by similar Greek and Near Easternones.[8] Earlier Indian epics such as Vyasa's Mahabharata and Valmiki's Ramayana alsocontained fables within the main story, often as side stories or back-story. The most famous folkstories from the Near East were the One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the ArabianNights.
The Panchatantra is an ancient Indian assortment of fables. The earliest recorded work,ascribed to Vishnu Sharma, dates to around 300 BCE. The tales are likely much older than thecompilation, having been passed down orally prior to the book's compilation. The word“Panchatantra” is a blend of the words "pancha" (which means "five" in Sanskrit) and "tantra"(which means "weave"). It implies weaving together multiple threads of narrative and morallessons together to form a book.
Fables had a further long traditionthrough the Middle Ages, and becamepart of European high literature. Duringthe 17th century, the French fabulist Jeande La Fontaine (1621–1695) saw the soulof the fable in the moral — a rule ofbehavior. Starting with the Aesopianpattern, La Fontaine set out to satirizethe court, the church, the risingbourgeoisie, indeed the entire humanscene of his time.[10] La Fontaine's modelwas subsequently emulated by England'sJohn Gay (1685–1732);[11] Poland'sIgnacy Krasicki (1735–1801);[12] Italy'sLorenzo Pignotti (1739–1812)[13] andGiovanni Gherardo de Rossi(1754–1827);[14] Serbia's DositejObradović (1739–1811); Spain's FélixMaría de Samaniego (1745–1801)[15] andTomás de Iriarte y Oropesa (1750–1791);[16] France's Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian(1755–94);[17] and Russia's Ivan Krylov (1769–1844).[18]
Europe
Fable - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable#Modern_era
In modern times, while the fable has been trivialized in children's books, it has also been fullyadapted to modern adult literature. Felix Salten's Bambi (1923) is a Bildungsroman — a story ofa protagonist's coming-of-age — cast in the form of a fable. James Thurber used the ancientfable style in his books Fables for Our Time (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956),and in his stories "The Princess and the Tin Box" in The Beast in Me and Other Animals (1948)and "The Last Clock: A Fable for the Time, Such As It Is, of Man" in Lanterns and Lances(1961). Władysław Reymont's The Revolt (1922), a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution of1917, described a revolt by animals that take over their farm in order to introduce "equality."George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) similarly satirized Stalinist Communism in particular, andtotalitarianism in general, in the guise of animal fable.
In the 21st century, the Neapolitan writer Sabatino Scia is the author of more than two hundredfables that he describes as “western protest fables.” The characters are not only animals, butalso things, beings, and elements from nature. Scia's aim is the same as in the traditional fable,playing the role of revealer of human society. In Latin America, the brothers Juan and VictorAtaucuri Garcia have contributed to the resurgence of the fable. But they do so with a novelidea: use the fable as a means of dissemination of traditional literature of that place. In the book"Fábulas Peruanas" (http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/BookPreview?bookid=atafabu_00510018&route=author_Spanish&lang=Spanish&msg&ilang=Spanish) published in 2003,they have collected myths, legends, beliefs of Andean and Amazonian Peru, to write as fables.The result has been an extraordinary work rich in regional nuances. Here we discover therelationship between man and his origin, with nature, with its history, its customs and beliefsthen become norms and values.[19] Modern research scientists also sometimes attempted toconvey their observations and thoughts using fables as a medium of idea exchange. [20]
Aesop, by Velázquez Vyasa Valmiki
Modern era
Fabulists
Fable - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable#Modern_era
▪ Gish Jen (3 Jan 2011). "Three Modern Fables to Capture Your Imagination" (https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132621436/three-modern-fables-to-capture-your-imagination) (Audio withtranscript). NPR : All Things Considered.
▪ Tobias Carroll (29 Sep 2017). "The Challenge of Modern Fables: Ben Loory's EruditeSurrealism" (https://www.tor.com/2017/09/29/the-challenge-of-modern-fables-ben-loorys-erudite-surrealism/). Tor.com.
▪ Robert Spencer Knotts. "Modern Fables" (http://www.thehumanityproject.com/fables). TheHumanity Project.
1. For example, in First Timothy, "neither give heed to fables...", and "refuse profane and oldwives' fables..." (1 Tim 1:4 and 4:4, respectively).
2. Strong's 3454. μύθος muthos moo’-thos; perhaps from the same as 3453 (through the ideaof tuition); a tale, i.e. fiction ("myth"):—fable."For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you thepower and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty." (2ndPeter 1:16)
3. Enzyklopädie des Märchens (1977), see "Fabel", "Äsopica" etc.
4. Burkert 1992:121
5. P. W. Buckham, p. 245
6. Atim Oton (October 25, 2011). "Reaching African Children Through Fables and Animation"(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/atim-oton/arits-fables-kids-series_b_1001656.html).Huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved May 8, 2012.
7. Ohale, Nagnath (2020-05-25). "Indian Fables Stories - In Indian Culture Indian fables withmorals" (https://inindianculture.com/indian-fables-stories/). In Indian Culture. Retrieved2020-07-16.
8. Ben E. Perry, "Introduction", p. xix, in Babrius and Phaedrus (1965)
9. "Fabel van de smid en de hond" (https://lib.ugent.be/viewer/archive.ugent.be:B04BBED2-F681-11E9-9639-C36B765DA7FD#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-675,0,4065,2270). lib.ugent.be.Retrieved 2020-09-28.
10. Translations of his 12 books of fables are available online at oaks.nvg.org (http://oaks.nvg.org/fontaine.html)
11. His two collections of 1727 and 1738 are available in one volume on Google Books atbooks.google.co.uk (https://archive.org/details/fablesjohngayil00owengoog)
12. His Bajki i przypowieści (Fables and Parables, 1779) are available online at ug.edu.pl (http://literat.ug.edu.pl/ikbajk/index.htm)
13. His Favole e Novelle (1785) is available on (https://archive.org/details/favoleenovelle01pigngoog). da'torchi di R.di Napoli. 1830. Retrieved May 8, 2012 – via Internet Archive. "pignottifavola."
14. Rossi, Giovanni Gherardo De (1790). His Favole (1788) is available on Google Books (https://books.google.com/books?id=rKoTAAAAQAAJ&q=pignotti+++favola). Retrieved May 8,2012.
15. 9 books of fables are available online in Spanish at amediavoz.com (http://amediavoz.com/samaniego.htm)
Notes
Fable - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable#Modern_era
16. His Fabulas Literarias are available on (https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Zr0DAAAAQAAJ). 1816. Retrieved May 8, 2012 – via Internet Archive. "Tomás de Iriarte y Oropesa fabulas."
17. His five books of fables are available online in French at shanaweb.net (http://www.shanaweb.net/florian/la-vie-de-florian.htm) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20100612144726/http://shanaweb.net/florian/la-vie-de-florian.htm) 2010-06-12 at the Wayback Machine
18. 5 books of fables are available online in English at friends-partners.org (http://www.friends-partners.org/friends/literature/19century/krylov2.html) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20110221221002/http://www.friends-partners.org/friends/literature/19century/krylov2.html)2011-02-21 at the Wayback Machine
19. Juan y Víctor Ataucuri García, "Fábulas Peruanas", Gaviota Azul Editores, Lima, 2003ISBN 9972-2561-0-3.
20. Vuong, Quan-Hoang (2022). The Kingfisher Story Collection. Amazon Digital Services.
21. Kermode, Mark (30 July 2013). "The Devil's Backbone: The Past Is Never Dead . . " (https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2850-the-devil-s-backbone-the-past-is-never-dead). TheCriterion Collection. The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 25 June 2016. "For those with aweakness for the beautiful monsters of modern cinema, del Toro has earned himself areputation as the finest living exponent of fabulist film."
▪ Buckham, Philip Wentworth (1827). Theatre of the Greeks (https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_IjAZAAAAYAAJ). J. Smith. "The Theatre of the Greeks."
▪ King James Bible (http://www.studylight.org/desk/?l=en&query=fable§ion=0&translation=kjv&oq=&sr=1); New Testament (authorised).
▪ DLR [David Lee Rubin]. "Fable in Verse", The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry andPoetics.
▪ Read fables by Aesop (http://fairytalez.com/author/aesops-fables/) and La Fontaine (http://fairytalez.com/author/la-fontaine/)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fable&oldid=1112612150"
This page was last edited on 27 September 2022, at 05:06 (UTC).
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0; additional terms may apply. Byusing this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of theWikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
References
Fable - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable#Modern_era
