Fable
Fable is a literary genre defined as 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.
The fable is one of the most enduring forms of folk literature, spread abroad, modern researchers agree,[3] less by literary anthologies than by oral transmission.
When Babrius set down fables from the Aesopica in verse for a Hellenistic 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").
While Phaedrus's Latinizations became classic (transmitted through the Middle Ages, though attributed to a certain Romulus, now considered legendary), the writing of fables in Greek did not stop; in the 2nd century AD, Babrius wrote beast fables in Greek in the manner of Aesop, which would also become influential in the Middle Ages (and sometimes transmitted as Aesop's work).
The need of instructors to teach, and students to learn, a wide range of fables as material for their declamations resulted in their being gathered together in collections, like those of Aesop.
As they have for thousands of years, people of all ages in Africa continue to interact with nature, including plants, animals and earthly structures such as rivers, plains, and mountains.
[7] Joel Chandler Harris wrote African-American fables in the Southern context of slavery under the name of Uncle Remus.
The Disney movie Song of the South introduced many of the stories to the public and others not familiar with the role that storytelling played in the life of cultures and groups without training in speaking, reading, writing, or the cultures to which they had been relocated to from world practices of capturing Africans and other indigenous populations to provide slave labor to colonized countries.
These included Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, the Hitopadesha, Vikram and The Vampire, and Syntipas' Seven Wise Masters, which were collections of fables that were later influential throughout the Old World.
Collections titled Romulus inspired a flurry of medieval authors to newly translate (sometimes into local vernaculars), versify and rewrite fables.
The most common version of this tale-like biography is attributed to the Byzantine scholar Maximus Planudes (1260–1310), who also gathered and edited fables for posterity.
[citation needed] During the 17th century, the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) saw the soul of the fable in the moral—a rule of behavior.
Starting with the Aesopian pattern, La Fontaine set out to satirize the court, the church, the rising bourgeoisie, indeed the entire human scene of his time.
In the book "Fábulas Peruanas" Archived 2015-09-23 at the Wayback Machine, published in 2003, they have collected myths, legends, and beliefs of Andean and Amazonian Peru, to write as fables.
