Literature
Verse Fable
A verse fable is a short narrative poem that conveys a moral or lesson through the use of animals or inanimate objects as characters. It often employs allegory and anthropomorphism to illustrate human behavior and societal issues. The form has been popular throughout literary history, with notable examples including Aesop's Fables and Jean de La Fontaine's works.
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5 Key excerpts on "Verse Fable"
eBook - PDF- M.O. Grenby(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
chapter-1 Fables T he classic fable is a short, W ctional tale which has a speci W c moral or behavioural lesson to teach. This lesson is often explained at the end of the tale in an epigram or ‘moral’. Some describe human interactions: ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ for instance. But most feature animals as their main characters, representing human beings, or perhaps particular types of people or kinds of behaviour. In these ‘beast fables’ the animals are generally fairly lifelike – except that they can often talk – and they do not usually encounter humans. This distinguishes them from animals in fairy tales, often enchanted in one way or another, who interact with humans and live what are essentially human lives. Like fairy tales, fables probably had their origins in an oral folk tale tradition and were not originally intended only for children. Also like fairy tales, fables subsequently came to be associated primarily with the young. Fables are still being written, mainly for children, but sometimes with the hope of appealing to a mixed-age audience. These modern fables can be much grander a V airs that the short, allegorical animal stories that W rst de W ned the genre. They are often novel-length, with many characters and intri-cate plots, like Robert O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby and the Rats of � nimh-( 1971 ). They can have complicated themes and enigmatic mean-ings, like E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web ( 1952 ). Sometimes they seek to give much more scienti W cally accurate representations of animal life, as in Richard Adams’ Watership Down ( 1972 ). They have some-times taken their lessons from a much wider range of animals than generally feature in Aesop, as in Those Other Animals ( 1892 ) by G. A. Henty, who preferred to draw lessons from animals ‘whose good points have been hitherto ignored’ – like the bacillus – and ‘to take down others from the pedestal upon which they have been placed’.
eBook - PDF- H. J. Blackham(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Fable is the achievement of a significant generality shown in concrete form. In this sense, poetry has no message; fable has nothing else. The medium is the message of a message. Exegesis 0 A fable has unmistakable meaning, or else it fails absurdly. Mime also, one might say, must communicate instantly. Unfortunately, (v) Exegesis 239 mime needs a spectator and fable a reader. There are risks inseparable from the transaction. When what you say means c plus qu'il ne semble', or when you say one thing and mean another, the risk is obvious. Irony is a faqon de parler that might seem designed for disaster as plain speaking. Indirection, concealment, teasing are indeed put in to put off, even if it be a way to catch attention. If what is to be understood is only implied, it has to be unfolded in being taken in. In short, there is an element of delay built into the fable as communication, with the liability of loss on the way. If what the fable would say could be said directly, it should be. Thus, although a fable is not a riddle, both the amusement and the message are served by taxing the reader's wits. Collaboration is called for, and relied on. A variety of material has been studied recently on the assumption that important meanings are encoded within it, not manifest. In-cluded are myths, fairy-tales, folk-poetry, nursery rhymes; tradi-tional material of this kind, some of which is strange to common sense. Myths and even Aesopic fables were allegorized in past periods and cultural contexts, but the present approach is more sophisticated in theory and method, in its attempt to be objective where direct test is not practicable. Is the Aesopic fable properly subject to this kind of scrutiny? The fables are listed in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (2nd edn. 1955), and the references are given by Perry (p. 421).
eBook - PDF- R. Howard Bloch(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
Beastly Talk: The Fables The word fable designates both a discourse and a literary genre, the root re-ferring, as in the fabliau “La Vieille Truande,” to the raw matter of a story out of which the poet makes a tale, matter conceived before literary treatment: Des fables fet on les fabliaus. Et des notes les sons noviaus. Et des materes les canchons, Et des draps, cauces et cauchons. 1 Out of fables one makes fabliaux; out of notes, new sounds; out of material, songs; and out of cloth, socks and shoes. Functioning as the aventure does for the lai, the basic material of the fable, having been transformed, gains the resonance of a didactic “tale” alongside the dit, beau dit, mots, beaux mots, or aventure, which also carries, as we have seen, the meaning “story.” Because of the lesson that it is intended to teach, the fable is closer to the “exemplum” than to other short forms, yet remains distinct from the “miracle” as from the dit moral. For however much the fable may exhibit elements of realism and of the new materialism of France’s and Anglo-Normandy’s burgeoning courts and urban centers, about which we will have more to say later, it cannot escape association with the oppo-site of the truth. In a semantic heritage reaching back to late antiquity, the word fable is also synonymous with a lie, with ruse, or with fi ction, its mean-ing doubling that of tru ff e, risée, mensonge, merveille, fantosme, bourde, or gabet, a distinction that the poet of the epic Aiol invokes in generational and generic terms: 2 Cil novel jongleur en sont mal escarni: Por les fables qu’il dient ont tout mis en oubli, La plus veraie estoire ont laissiet et guerpi, Je vos en dirai une qui bien fait a cierer. 3 These new jongleurs are badly shamed. Because of the fables they recount they have squandered everything, and the most truthful story they have for-gotten and abandoned.
eBook - PDFGreek and Roman Folklore
A Handbook
- Graham Anderson(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
Five Folk Wit and Wisdom: From Fable to Anecdote After the more ambitious and complex tales that constitute folktale, myth, fairy tale, or legend, there are a great many others on a less ambitious scale. Alan Dundes included, beside myths, legends, and folktales, forms as diverse as jokes, proverbs, riddles, chants, charms, blessings, curses, oaths, insults, retorts, taunts, teases, toasts, tongue twisters, and greeting and leave-taking forms among the smaller forms of popularly transmitted folklore, and his list extends much further still. 1 We shall not be able, within the scope of this book, to attempt the collection or even illustration of all of these, but we can offer a sufficient cross section of recognizable forms to note at least their existence in antiquity. FABLES Fables and proverbs, in particular, present two overlapping categories of folk wisdom which persisted well beyond the end of antiquity: we might also add riddles into the melting pot of popular culture, and all three forms can acquire value as entertainment as well as wisdom. Fables are perhaps the most familiar kind of popular storytelling in antiquity to us. Yet defi- nition remains elusive. 2 We could suggest that the fable is a short, simple narrative, often with an animal context, containing a lesson for life. We must add “often” because it is easy enough to find materials in the standard fable collections that have neither animal speakers nor even any explicit lesson or moral, and yet their material seems somehow to be in the right place. We also need to underline the expression “lesson for life”; it is not Q
- Aaron W. Hughes, James T. Robinson, Aaron W. Hughes, James T. Robinson, Aaron Hughes, James Robinson(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Indiana University Press(Publisher)
10 or cosmological: one explains how ravens acquired their awkward gait, the other accounts for why the seas lack a foxlike creature.Complementing these differences are the “family resemblances” that demarcate the contours of Aesopian fable. The narratives conform to a pattern recognized by Walter Benjamin: they are meant to entertain, to be memorable, and to be practical or “useful”; their style is “chastely compact,” unconcerned with conveying information.11 The fabulists are unburdened with the task of describing the times and places of the action; they neither detail the biographical background of their characters nor do they provide explicit theoretical explanation for their characters’ behavior. Another critic has noticed that a fable’s characters tend to “act on the basis of desire” and are “thwarted in that desire because another character . . . opposes and defeats it, also by desire. Desire is thus vanquished by desire.”12 Other critics have remarked that, unlike fairy tales, fables “have no element of magic” and “no happy ending, except for the villains”;13 unlike fairy tales, fables do not allow for supernatural intervention or deus ex machina either to advance the aims of their characters or to save them from catastrophe.14 Aesopian fables simulate the writing of history; they describe the singularity of a past event. The import of their moral message is often questionable, ambiguous, or elusive.15 More allusive and provocative than dogmatic, the fables invite contemplation and stimulate thought rather than supply definitive answers. The fables tend to depict the implications of fixed identity, illustrating the futility of efforts to escape destiny. Typically, their preferred dramatis personae are nonhuman animals. Aesopian fables are therefore easily distinguished from the popular genre of exempla, in which the heroes to be emulated are not fictitious animals with questionable morality but actual or legendary human saints and scholars whose piety and righteousness are exemplary.16
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